months with Lord and Lady Galloway at their beautiful place on the Wigtownshire coast; and this was certainly, as it turned out, the most favourable and beneficial solution of the difficult question of providing a suitable and congenial home for one who, whilst the possessor of three or four splendid seats in England and Scotland, had yet, by a pathetic anomaly, never known what home life was since his mother's death in 1859. At Galloway House he found himself for the first time the inmate of a large and cheerful family circle, including several young people of about his own age. "I am comfortably established here," he wrote to Lady Elizabeth Moore soon after his arrival in December, 1860. "This house is like Dumfries House, but much prettier. I have a charming room, not at all lonely. Lord and Lady G. are so kind to me, and the little girls treat me like a brother." "They are all very very kind to me," he wrote a week or two later, adding in the same letter that he had on the previous day attended two services in Lord Galloway's private chapel. "It is very plain," was the comment of the thirteen-year-old critic; "but the chaplain's sermons were all about the saints and the Church. Do you know what he called the Communion? a 'commemorative sacrifice!' In a subsequent letter he says, "Mr. Wildman (the chaplain) says that Mary should be called the 'Holy Mother of God.'"

1861, At Galloway House

These new religious impressions, contrasting sharply as they must have done with the narrow Evangelical teaching of his early days, are of interest in connection with his first schoolmaster's report of him some six months later, which will be mentioned in its proper place. "He was very fond," writes one of his former playfellows at Galloway House in those far-off days, "of sketching with pen and pencil religious processions and ceremonies, and his thoughts seemed to be constantly turned on religion. He liked having religious discussions with our family chaplain, who was a clever and well-read man." "Our dear father and mother," writes another member of the same large family, "told us that we must be very kind to him, as he had lost both his parents and was almost alone in the world. I remember seeing him in the library on the night of his arrival—a tall, dark, good-looking boy, looking so shy and lonely, but with very nice manners." "I recollect him," says the son of a neighbouring laird, who was about two years his senior, and was often at Galloway House, "rather a pathetic figure among the swarm of joyous young things there, distinct among them from never seeming joyous himself." This was doubtless the impression which his extreme diffidence generally made on strangers; and it is the pleasanter to read the further testimony of the playfellow already quoted: "His shyness soon wore off when he got away from the elders to play with us, and he entered with zest into all our amusements. He was intensely earnest about everything he took up, whether serious things or games. He was greatly attached to our brother Walter,[4] whose bright, cheery nature appealed to him. Walter was always full of fun and spirits and mischief; and Bute was delighted at this, and soon joined in it all. I remember our old housekeeper, after some great escapade, saying, "Yes, and the young marquis was as bad as any of you!" One of his hobbies was collecting from the seashore the skulls and skeletons of rabbits, birds, etc. I spent much time on the cliffs and rocks looking for these things, of which we collected boxes full. With his curious psychic turn of mind he liked to conduct some kind of ceremonies over these remains after dark, inviting us children to take part, sometimes dressed in white sheets. He loved legends of all kinds, and used often to tell them to us: I was very fond of hearing him, he told them so well. History, too, especially Scottish history, he liked very much. He wrote a delightful little history of Scotland for my youngest brother,[5] of whom he was very fond—a tiny boy then. It was all written in capital letters, with delightful and clever pen-and-ink sketches, one on every page."

These recollections of happy home life in a Scottish country house, nearly sixty years ago, call up a pretty picture of the orphan boy, whose childhood had been so strangely lonely and isolated, contented and at home in this charming family circle. That he was truly so is further testified by letters that passed about this time between him and his tutor-at-law, Colonel Crichton Stuart. In reply to a letter from Colonel Stuart, expressing a desire to hear from Bute himself whether he was comfortably settled at Galloway House, the boy wrote: "In answer to your request, I write to confirm Mr. A.'s statement regarding my happiness here. Lord and Lady Galloway did indeed receive me as a child of their own, which I felt deeply."

That these words were a sincere expression of the young writer's sentiments there is no reason to doubt; but thoughtful and advanced as he was in some ways for his years, he was too young to realise then—-possibly he did later on, though he very seldom spoke of his boyhood's days—how much more he owed to the Galloway family than mere kindness. It seemed, indeed, a special providence which had brought the orphaned marquis at this critical moment under influence so salutary and so much needed as that of the admirable and excellent family which had welcomed him to their beautiful home as one of themselves. The numerous letters written by Bute at this period, of which many have been preserved, are marked indeed by propriety of expression and a command of language remarkable in a boy of his age; but they also reveal very clearly a self-centred view of life even more extraordinary in so young a boy, and due, it cannot be doubted, to the singularity of his upbringing. Surrounded from babyhood by a circle of adoring females, in whose eyes the fatherless infant was the most precious and priceless thing on earth, he had grown up to boyhood penetrated, no doubt almost unconsciously, with an exaggerated and overweening sense of his own importance in the scale of creation, to which the wholesome influence of Galloway House provided the best possible corrective. Distinguished, high-principled, exemplary in every relation of life, Lord and Lady Galloway held up to their children, by precept and example, a constant ideal of duty, unselfishness and simplicity of life; and the young stranger within their gates was fortunate in being able to profit by that teaching. If his future life was to be marked by generous impulses and noble ambitions—if one of his most notable characteristics was to be a personal simplicity of taste and an utter antipathy to that ostentation which is not always dissociated from high rank and almost unbounded wealth—if he was to realise something of the supreme joy and satisfaction of working for others rather than for oneself; for all this he owed a debt of gratitude (can it be doubted?) to the kindly and gracious influences which were brought to bear on his sensitive nature during these years of his boyhood. He was received at Galloway House as a child of the family; and his companions spoke their minds to him with fraternal freedom. "You will never find your level, Bute," the eldest son of the house (whom he greatly liked and respected) once said to him, "until you get to a public school." He did not resent the remark, for his good sense told him that it was true. Harrow