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BOYHOOD: ETON AND CAMBRIDGE

The subject of this Memoir was born in London on July 9, 1845, at 36 Wilton Crescent, the house of his grandmother, Lady Hislop. He was given the family name of Gilbert, and the second name of John after his uncle and godfather, Lord John Russell. Two months later his father. Lord Melgund, who was then out of Parliament, carried off his wife and child on one of those protracted continental visits which were the fashion in that generation. The Melgunds took with them their carriage--in which a shelf had been fitted to serve as the baby's crib--a courier, a nurse, and a lady's maid, and made a leisurely progress up the Rhine to Switzerland, and then over the St. Gothard into Italy. The winter was spent chiefly in Rome and Turin with the British Minister, Sir Ralph Abercromby,* who had married Lady Mary Elliot. Country house visits filled the rest of that year, and at Cambridge Gilbert John took his first wavering steps on the lawn in front of the lodge at Trinity. It was not until the early spring of 1847 that the Melgunds returned to Scotland and the child saw the home of his ancestors.

*Afterwards Lord Dunfermline.

Most of Gilbert John's boyhood was spent at Minto, and it would be hard to find a happier environment for a child than the roomy old Border house set among its lawns and glens and woodlands. All accounts agree on the sunniness of his temper, the vigour of his body, and his uncommon good looks. He had his mother's deep blue eyes, which Mrs. Norton praised in the style of the period.* Presently brothers came to keep him company: Arthur, born in 1846; Hugh in 1848; Fitzwilliam in 1849; and the four little boys formed a stalwart clan, sufficiently near in age to be true playmates.

* The following verses were written as a postscript to a letter from "Miss Letitia Bellamy" in London to Miss Fanny Law of Clare, Northumberland, describing Lady Melgund's children among others at a children's party given by the Duchess of Argyll. They were published in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, edited by Mrs. Norton:--

"The prizes have been given--but no time can be lost, I must hurry lightly through them if I wish to save the post: For the loveliest sleeping infant, to the Duchess of Argyll (It was like a little rosebud, if a rosebud could but smile), The prettiest two-year-old who walked the distance from the door Being carried in his nurse's arms and set down on the floor, And the loveliest little three-year-old that ever yet was seen, In a glittering ducal palace or a daisied village green, With eyelashes like shadows and eyes like summer stars, A little stately, graceful thing no imperfection mars: Both were won by Lady Melgund, I don't know who had gained The ones before I entered, these were all that then remained"

Gilbert John Elliot, at the age of thirteen (From a miniature at Minto House)

The love of horses was Gilbert's absorbing passion, and during his continental visits at the age of one he was reported by his father to have shown a precocious knowledge of horseflesh at the various posting-houses. Before he was four he rode a bay Shetland pony, "Mazeppa," under the tuition of the old groom, Robert Donald, and barely a year later commenced his hunting career with the Duke of Buccleuch's hounds, of which hunt he was one day to become a noted figure. It was a recognized practice on the days he was going to hunt not to send up his porridge, as he was far too excited to eat any breakfast.

Few children can have had more engaging ways. The love of his home was deep in him, and before he was five, when driving with his mother to inspect the havoc caused among the Minto trees by a gale, he revealed his anxious affection. She writes: "Berty invariably shuts his eyes not to see the injured silver. 'No, I can't bear to look at it, it makes my heart too sad,' and occasionally he sighs out a most mournful 'Alas' when we pass any grievous wrecks. His sentiment about everything surpasses anything I ever heard, and in some things he certainly shows considerateness beyond his years; he always offers to go out with me, and often insists on doing so, though I know he would rather have his pony. Once he said to the nurse, 'Well, I would rather ride, but I promised Papa to take care of Mama, and so I had better go with her;' and it is perfectly true that William did tell him so, but I was not at all aware how seriously he was impressed with the charge. However, he certainly keeps his promises, for he watches me as a cat does a mouse."

Lady Minto often breaks off her letters to chronicle the return of the boys and dogs, far too dirty to be allowed to come beyond the door. There were many sports in that happy place: rabbit-hunting in the Lamblairs, fishing in the Teviot and the hill burns, house-building with fir branches on the side of the Big Glen below the Green Walk, tree-climbing in the great beeches and sycamores whence the upper windows of the house could be spied on, walking--in emulation of certain feats of a previous generation--along the stone ledge which runs round the top of the house, skating and glissading in the bitter winters which now seem to be unknown in the land. They were even allowed to keep a lamb under the turret stairs, which their long-suffering mother did not evict until it became a sheep.

Usually Minto was filled with a big family party, but there came times when Lord Melgund was attending the House of Commons, and mother and children were left in comparative solitude. Such seasons were devoted by her to the beginning of their education. The family did not believe in private schools, and certainly with such a mother no seminary for youth could compare with home. Her strong good sense on these matters is witnessed by a hundred passages in her letters: "Minds, like bodies, should have good solid meals, and leisure for digestion, and time to stretch! Beef makes bone, and les études fortes nourish the mind; but it will not do to let it gnaw every merry-thought, nor refine itself into spun sugar" In her room the boys read poetry and history and fairy tales, and we hear of Gilbert declaiming with passion Pope's version of Diomede's speech in the 9th Iliad. But the chief formative influence was the atmosphere of good talk in which they lived, talk about books and politics and the events of a larger world, which stimulates a child's interest. Gilbert was, in his mother's view, a little slower to quicken than the others, for he had a certain placidity and contentment which lived happily in the day and might foretell a lack of mental enterprise.

On his seventh birthday she writes in her journal:--

"He is not as advanced in learning as many of his contemporaries, but he learns easily and bids fair to possess more than average intelligence. He has a good memory, is very observing, and extremely obedient and docile. He has a natural turn for poetry, and certainly admires the beauty of numbers even when he can scarce understand the words. He is very fond of fairy tales, and indeed of any description of story I will read to him, unless it is very dry or he suspects me of an intention to instruct him. . . . I don't think he has as much curiosity to learn about the things round him as his brothers have." (Those earnest inquirers, be it remembered, were of ages varying from two to five.) "He has a most amiable disposition, and not a spark of malice, sulkiness, or envy in his character. He is very sweet-tempered and yielding, always gay, never put out. . . . I don't think him a child gifted with deep sensibilities or enthusiastic feelings of any kind, neither has he the perseverance or love of overcoming obstacles of some children, but he is sensitive to blame, and has little sentimentalities about localities and past days, is very open to impressions of fine weather, scenery, and pleasant ideas of all kinds. He is very courageous and high-spirited."

And the candid mother concludes that "energy and perseverance" are the qualities at present most to seek, qualities which were assuredly not absent in his subsequent career.

In 1853 the children joined their grandparents at Nervi, on the Riviera, returning by the Lake of Geneva, where Gilbert had his first sight of the snow mountains which later were to throw their glamour over his fancy. His military instincts were early apparent, and the Crimean War gave him something to talk about; he used to present himself daily at the luncheon table after the newspapers had arrived with the breathless question, "Does Silistria still hold out?"

It is a delightful group of boys that is portrayed in Lady Minto's letters, portrayed by one who understood all the subtleties of childhood. "The people who really enjoy life in this house are the boys," she writes; "nevertheless, I suppose they have their grievances, for Fitz told me one day he could never remember the time when he had been happy! Hughie, on being asked what he thought of things in general, answered, 'Oh, weary! weary! no change, the same thing every day; I think we must go to Africa.' And the next day he repeated his African intentions to me, adding, 'And if we did go I suppose they would put taxes on everything directly--tax the date trees.' I made out afterwards that his horror of taxation arose from a difficulty about keeping another dog which he had been wanting to have."*

* There is a story of one of the little boys who bore with difficulty the visit of several girl cousins. On their departure he was heard condoling with his dog: "Poor old man, poor old fellow, did those horrid little girls give you fleas?"

II

Gilbert went to Eton in the summer half of 1859, to Mr. Balstone's house, which next year became Mr. Warre's. In July his grandfather died, and by his father's accession to the earldom he became Lord Melgund. He was no classical scholar, though, like Kinglake, he had "learned the Iliad through Pope in his mother's dressing-room," and the Eton of his day did not offer much in the way of a general education. His mother writes:--

"Berty has already taken his first flight from home. He left us for Eton last May, and has now returned to spend his second holiday with us. Gentle, gentlemanlike and loving, manly, intelligent and sincere, his character promises well for future goodness. His learning will never be deep nor his energy great, nor is he remarkable either for originality or quickness, but he is sensible, easily interested, likes history, poetry, and drawing, and will, I think, as I have always thought, learn more when his learning is of a kind more to his mind. . . . He is impressible, and not without a desire of doing well. His chief characteristic has ever been his strong moral sense."

Melgund speedily found his feet at Eton: he was supremely happy, and flung the full vigour of his strong young body into every form of sport. His mother records his cheery letters: during the first summer half he wrote that he had started in the school tub race and had come in seventy-second, which, he adds, was not so bad for a first attempt. His optimism was fully justified, as before leaving Eton he had pulled up seventy-one places, finishing second in the School Sculling. He also made a name for himself in the running field, was just beaten in the mile race, and ran the "Long Walk" (three miles) in fifteen and a half minutes.

The journal which he began to keep in 1861 is as scrappy as other schoolboy chronicles. It records famous days with the beagles, steeplechases, and games of football in which he was a demon at shinning, but the river was his chief joy. He rowed in the Defiance and the Victory, and in his last summer half was first choice out of the Eight, winning the Silver Sculls. Corkran (Captain of the Boats) and he were both hoisted after the race. The determination to keep fit prevented any indulgence at the sock shop. The Elliots were a hardy race, and Melgund remembered his indignation at being given a greatcoat when he first went to Eton, driving from Hawick to Carlisle, a distance of nearly fifty miles, on the top of the stage coach.

A few characteristic entries may be quoted from the journal. He writes on February 1863:--

"The Prince of Wales came through here to-day: he had been out with the harriers. I thought he looked a very decent sort of chap, but I didn't see what sort of a horse he had."

The marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales in March gave the Eton boys a holiday.

"At 10:30 the whole school assembled in the School Yard and walked up arm-in-arm to the Castle. We had a very good place inside the upper gates of the Castle. There was an awful crowd, which I got jolly well into once and had roaring fun. We went, down to the College for dinner, and went up to the Castle again afterwards to see the Prince and Princess of Wales depart for Osborne. Directly their carriage had passed all the Eton fellows rushed through the crowd and regularly forced their way down to the corner of the street near Layton's, where a body of police were drawn up, but they were quickly dispersed, and we rushed down to the station, broke through the barrier, and got on to the platform and squealed like mad. I had a better view of the Princess than I ever had before, as she stood bolt upright in the railway carriage as it went slowly out of the station. It was about the greatest lark I ever had, bowling over the crowd, which was a thundering tight one, and smashing through the police!"

In the summer half of 1863 Melgund was elected to "Pop," and made his maiden speech in favour of "instantaneously going to war with America." Under 2nd June the journal has this entry:--

"Jersey,* Hope major,** Phipps, and I made up a nice little party to go to Ascot. We all of us wore whiskers except Jersey, who wore a loose overcoat and a blue veil. I wore a flexible moabite sort of hat and my great-coat. Hope looked about the handsomest fellow I ever saw: he had on a light-coloured overcoat and black whiskers. We all had light ties We went to Bachelor's Acre, where we got into an open fly which we had ordered beforehand and drove in it. We got to Ascot about twenty minutes past four. When we got to the course we all took off our false whiskers except Phipps, but he got so bothered by the Gypsies, who asked him whose hair he had got on, etc., that he finally had to follow our example. Hope and I somehow or other got separated from Jersey and Phipps; we caught sight of Parker and a lot of fellows who had a drag; they gave us some champagne and let us stand on the top of the drag. Phipps and Jersey walked right up to 'Parva Dies'* and were nailed. We saw one race--the Prince of Wales' Stakes: 'Avenger' won. I thought the race itself an awfully pretty sight and very exciting. We started from Ascot about five, and got back in loads of time. We got out of our fly at the footbarracks, where 'Sambo' (the raft man) met us and took our clothes. Day* complained of Jersey and Phipps, and they were both swished. There was great excitement about it, and the space round the swishing-room door was crowded."

* The seventh Earl of Jersey. The late Sir Edward Hope, K.C.B., registrar of the Privy Council, known among his friends as "Blackie" Hope.

* Mr. Day, one of the masters.

After this performance the quartette had the effrontery to be photographed in their costumes at Hills and Saunders'. There was a later escapade:--

"June 25th.--Went up town to make purchases in the shape of a disguise to go to Henley. After dinner I stayed out and started for Henley by a train which leaves Windsor at about 3:30. We drove from Twyford to Henley, a distance of about five miles. I had a round hat on and a thin overcoat, a moustache, no whiskers, and a couple of bits of sticking plaster on my face. Sherbrooke had nothing but a thin overcoat and a pair of blue spectacles. Very few fellows knew us. Snowe (a master) went and came back with us in the same train, and I think if it had not been for Hubbard's and Freeling's good nature (they had left school) we should have been nailed.

"Hope lent me a key which would open all the doors of the carriages on the Great Western Line, which proved very useful. I was in a horrid funk when I first saw Snowe on the platform at Slough. I met him again at Henley once when I was walking on the bank, on which occasion we took advantage of our acquaintance with Heave, who is rowing for Trinity Hahl, and hung on to him and passed Snowe all right. The next time I met him was on the Bridge^ and I lounged by him without taking any notice, I met the Eight coming over the Bridge, just before they got into their boat. Sheepwood was one of the few fellows who recognized us: he set up a howl in the middle of the Bridge and swore he would have known us anywhere: he was very nearly getting us nailed, for Warre was close behind him, but luckily stopped just at the moment to say how-d'ye-do to Freeling.

"Snowe was on the station at Henley, but Hubbard and Freeling kept a lookout for us. We came back second class, and at Slough got out on the wrong side of the carriage. We got into a fly and drove up to Serle's, where we were the first to publish the news of the race. It was Eton 1st, Trinity Hall 2nd, and Radley 3rd. It is glorious our licking a Cambridge crew which is second boat on the river at Cambridge. We won by about a length and a half.

"When we came back I found that I had not been nailed, and Snowe called Sherbrooke in the evening and told him about the race. I felt rather guilty when my tutor came to tell me about it. He told the fellows in the Eight that he knew I should be as anxious to hear about it as any one.

"June 27th.--After lock-up my tutor sent for me and told me that my name was mixed up in the row about Henley, and after Prayers he came up to my room and began again. He was justgoing out of the room when he said, 'Then I am to understand that you were in the house?' I said, 'No, sir, I was not in the house.' He said, 'Where were you?' to which I answered, 'I was at Henley, sir.' He stood for some time without saying anything. At last he said that of course he would say nothing as I has told him in confidence, but that the thing was not yet finished. He was in an awful way about it, and declared that he would never go to Henley again as he had found out that he could not trust his fellows. The worst of him is that he expects you to treat him exactly as any of your friends, but I don't think tutor and pupil ought to be on the same footing.

"June 30th.--Yesterday my tutor sent for me and said that I had escaped out of the Henley row; that I was the luckiest fellow in creation; that I had been within an ace of being nailed; that inquiries had been made at the house, and that owing to some mistake of Mrs. Digby's (the matron) I had got off. He said there was only one link wanting in the evidence against me. This evening he came up to my room again and told me that there was a report that I had gone to Henley disguised as a Methodist Parson. At this I nearly had a fit of hysterics: of course the Methodist Parson was Lamb, who has been swished and turned down. My tutor says that the worst of this row is that if it happened again next year it might put a stop to our Eight going to Henley altogether. The only thing I care particularly about is that my tutor has taken it to heart."

On 17th July he writes in his journal:--

"Upper Eights were rowed to-day. I suppose this is the last long boat race I shall ever row in, and I am sorry for it. I do not believe there can be anything much jollier than rowing a good race: it is awfully stunning to come up with a boat and then go by and row past the Brocas in triumph. Even though you don't win the race, yet you know that you have done your best, and after all perhaps there is more honour in rowing a good stern race than in winning an easy one. . . . Sam Corkran wanted me to start with him in the pulling. I would have given worlds to start with Sam, but I did not see how I could get off Pope."

To refuse to row with the Captain of the Boats because he was pledged to another boy was proof of a stiff sense of honour. He stuck to Pope, and Corkran and Richards won the pulling.

Melgund was automatically moving up in the school; but his parents, fearing that sport was occupying the major part of his time, decided to take him away from these alluring surroundings and send him to a tutor. He regretfully bade farewell to Eton at the end of the summer half of 1863, just after his eighteenth birthday. He had become one of the most popular and distinguished figures in the school, and carried away with him sixty-four leaving books. Although he had frequently transgressed the rules from sheer devilry and love of excitement there had been no shadow of meanness or untruth on his career. With his tutor, Mr. Warre, he had formed a close friendship, for the latter, in spite of his strict standards of conduct, had much tolerance for youthful extravagances so long as they were honest and clean and did not offend against the canons of sportsmanship. To Lady Minto he wrote that "Melgund was unspoilt and unspoilable," while the journal records that "Warre certainly is a very jolly fellow, not the least like a master when he is not acting as one."

But the most delightful days in the retrospect of all the brothers were those spent at Minto, hunting and shooting, curling and skating in the winters, fishing and swimming in the long summer days. Hunting was the serious family pursuit--"A' Elliots can ride," said the old Buccleuch huntsman at a time when the two families were in opposite political camps and he was not prepared to allow them any other virtue. It was a Spartan business in those days, and we have a picture of the boys on bleak mornings shivering at covert side, in everyday little short jackets and waistcoats, a linen shirt (no under-flannels or drawers), trousers and riding-straps, no overcoats and no gloves. There was rarely a meet nearer than six or seven miles; ten miles was not considered distant, and fifteen nothing to complain of. The party would leave the house long before it was light, and hack the long roads in any weather^on the off-chance of hunting. In summer there was fishing in the Teviot, standing in the river all day up to their waists without waders; but the chief game was navigating a boat called a "trows," used for "burning the water," and consisting of two troughs joined together at an angle. In this venerable craft the boys shot the rapids of the Teviot, but the end came when Melgund and his brother Hugh embarked in it in a high spate, barely escaped shipwreck at Rulefoot, and in the end scrambled perilously ashore, while their Argo was whirled down towards Tweed. We hear of them in winter daring each other to swim the river in spate, and finishing stark naked in the open haugh with the sleet whipping their small bodies. There were days with the otter hounds, too, on Ale and Teviot, beginning long before sunrise; and there was shooting with old Stoddart, the head keeper, shooting with muzzle-loaders and later with pin-fire breech-loaders, pottering in the woods and boggy pastures, and long autumn days after grouse on the Langhope moors. There was no desire at Minto for record bags, and shooting always played second fiddle to hunting; but it was an enchanted country for boys to wander over with a gun.

School is a chief formative element, no doubt, in every life, but at that period still more depends upon the background of holidays, when young thoughts range adventurously before they find their inevitable grooves; and Eton in Melgund's case was only an interlude in the full and happy course of a Border boyhood. The hereditary feeling for his home, found in every Elliot, was strengthened by his mother's deep passion. She could write thus of the Craigs:--

"The White Rock this afternoon was much more like a holy place to me. Nothing could be more peaceful, and we all sat there for some time listening to the wood pigeons, and watching some boys wading in the river, probably following a salmon. I think sometimes if we would let God draw us to Him by means of the natural agencies with which He has surrounded us, instead of insisting upon it that we can only get at Him by violent and distasteful efforts of our own, by singing without voices and preaching without brains, we should be more religious people. And certainly no sermon I ever heard can speak to one's heart so forcibly as do the scenes and associations of an old family house like this, where tender memories are in every room, like dried flowers between the leaves of a book."

III

The autumn and winter of 1863 was spent by Melgund with a tutor in Dresden, and part of the summer of 1864 with a coach in the Isle of Wight. In February 1864 he went to hear the Queen's Speech in the House of Lords. The Elliot clan had for generations produced diplomats and lawgivers, but Melgund had scant respect for politicians, whose ways, he considered, lacked candour. While still at Eton his father had taken him to hear a debate in the House of Commons, and in the journal he describes the legislators as "about the noisiest set of old coves I have ever seen." It was an aversion of temperament which to some degree remained with him through life.

In October 1864 he and his brother Arthur went up to Cambridge together as fellow commoners of Trinity.* As a peer's son, according to the rule of those days, he had the privilege of taking his degree in seven terms instead of nine. The journal of his undergraduate life does not reflect any great desire for learning, but it reveals untiring enthusiasm for every form of sport. He naturally became a member of the Third Trinity Boat Club, and, though other arenas soon proved more attractive than the river, we find him a competitor for the ^olquhoun Sculls. He was distinguished on the running track, winning the Third Trinity Mile though heavily handicapped by having his arm strapped to his side owing to a fall with the Drag, and he came in second at the London Amateur Athletic Club. He was earnestly exhorted to continue that career by his friend, Dick Webster, the future Lord Chief Justice of England, who wrote him disconsolate letters from London complaining of the utter boredom of the study of law. The journal records "a match with Trickett for two miles, giving him a hundred yards start, and I backed myself £5 to a postage stamp to beat him. At first I thought I should hardly catch him, but very soon got up to him, and he shut up almost directly after I passed him." But soon all other sports gave way to his passion for riding and horses, not as an idle spectator but for the physical accomplishment of horsemanship. He never missed a good race meeting, if within reasonable distance, or a chance of riding in it. He hunted with the true Elliot industry, as witness this entry: "I went out with the Fitzwilliam to-day They met at Ashton Wold. I had about 32 miles to ride to cover . . . we had a pretty good day, and I had about 32 miles to ride home as we left off very near where we began." He had the good fortune to be out with the Pytchley the day of the famous "Waterloo Run." Captain Anstruther Thomson, the Master, was on his fifth horse, and Melgund on his hireling saw about a third of it. He was constantly at Newmarket, and rode frequently in local steeplechases, but he had then, as he always had, a dislike of the gambling fashion which tends to degrade a famous sport, and he never betted. In the jottings in his journal, and the correspondence which remains from those days, there is none of that dreary chatter about cash lost and won which makes the conversation of some honest sportsmen like the gossip of a bucket shop.

* Dr. Montagu Butler, Master of Trinity, wrote in 1914: "My memory goes back to 1865, when Melgund had but lately left Eton as confessedly one of the best loved that even that great school of friendship had produced."

There are records in the journal of balls and amateur theatricals and undergraduate high jinks which do not differ greatly from the undergraduate doings of to-day. He lived at the start with his brother Arthur in Rose Crescent, but when the latter went into college he migrated to a famous set of apartments called "French's," a resort of riding men, which remained his headquarters, except when he was careering about the country to race meetings, and contenting himself, if no better accommodation could be found, with a shake-down in a brush shop or the back room of a wine merchant.

There was little time left for study during those strenuous days. That the pace must have been furious is evident from the entries in his journal recording wonderful gallops, serious falls, and hairbreadth escapes. In reading old letters of this period from Queensberry, Aberdour,* Jersey, Horace Seymour, "Cat" Richardson, and others, one is struck by the deep affection in which Melgund was held by his friends. He brought from Eton the nickname of "Rolly" (apparently from his slightly rolling gait), and there must have been something curiously engaging in his manner, a kind of serious jollity, without a trace of the arrogant or the selfish or the peevish. But he did not win his popularity by any slackness of standards, for he had a very strict notion of what he considered right and wrong. He burned out a gambling set at French's with hot cayenne pepper, and when he first came up took a strong line about the snobbishness of some of the clubs. Snobbery, indeed, and all the minor vices which attend society, he cordially disliked. At the time his mother wrote of him: "Don't be alarmed about Berty; the ballroom will have no chance in his affection for many a day against the hunting field and the river: but his Dresden life has done him good by making him more ready to talk, and more anxious to understand what people are talking about. I must say, though I perhaps ought not, that he is a very satisfactory chip of a very good old block (I don't speak of his father only, but of his race); perfectly natural and unassuming, and as spirited and energetic as a boy can be." And again: "The boys' Cambridge talk is very amusing and thoroughly satisfactory--I mean as to the moral effect of their residence there. I can't say I see any evidence of intellectual training whatever; but it is impossible to listen to Berty's frank and full revelations of himself and his habits and companions without feeling thoroughly happy about him; he is not intellectual, but he has plenty of good sense, a singularly fair and candid mind, and a will strong enough to be unconscious of itself, by which I mean that there is no effort in his independence of mind. He sees what seems to him to be right, and as a matter of course does it."

* Afterwards twentieth Earl of Morton

Of his studies there are few records. The journal contains occasional entries such as:--

"Had a trigonometry paper this morning, which, of course, I did not attempt to do a word of. In the afternoon we had a Livy translation paper. I think I could have managed most of it with the help of the man next me, but unluckily I got throwing pens about, one of which cut over one of the examiners. . . . Hudson, the other examiner, got in a great rage: he found out that Montgomerie, among others, had been throwing pens about, and has gated him at 8 o'clock for the rest of the term. Luckily the term is just at an end. . . . Before I left Cambridge to-day I wrote a note to Hudson to tell him that it was I who had hit the examiner with the pen during the examination and not Montgomerie."

It may be mentioned that, in spite of a notable economy of effort Melgund never failed to pass the requisite examinations either at Eton or Cambridge.

His Cambridge vacations, like his Eton holidays, were pleasantly varied. Christmas of 1864 was spent with his family in Rome, as we learn from his mother's letters:--

"Berty, with all his spirits and idleness (which perhaps I exaggerate) is as good as it is possible to be. He has really not a wish or a taste or a habit which we would rather see away. He leads a very lively life, hunting twice a week, and going out constantly in the evenings to dinners, operas, balls, parties, and private theatricals. His dinners are frequently to meet Lord and Lady Grey, or some Monsignori, or some other persons equally old and dignified; but he always finds them 'awfully jolly,' is quite without shyness, and among foreigners or English has always the same perfectly easy well-bred manner."

Elsewhere she writes:--

"Berty, I fear, has no honourable intentions towards any of the many young ladies to whom he offers his hand in the cotillon. He dances six times in one evening with the prettiest, and blushes about her next day; and he dances most nights, and therefore blushes most mornings; but the first of pleasures to him is a good gallop across country, and no young lady would have the slightest chance of attracting his attention on hunting days. . . . His Sunday best costume includes a waistcoat with the buttons of a Cambridge Club-the 'Quare Haec'--and a breastpin in his cravat with a note of interrogation in dark blue enamel on a gold ground! I say that no one but Socrates has the right to go about in the guise of a perpetual question."

There were seasons at Minto when balls and race meetings were attractions which now took the place of the old voyaging in the "trows," and parties of Cambridge and Eton companions were added to the clan of relations. During two summer vacations Melgund went to Switzerland, once with his friend Maclean,* with whom he made the third ascent of the Schreckhorn; the journal records sleeping out on a ledge of rock in the snow from which the top was reached in seven and a half hours. They also climbed the Wetterhorn and Monte Rosa, and traversed the Jungfrau with the famous mountaineer, Mr. Horace Walker, and his daughter, leaving Zermatt just before Mr. Whymper's first ascent of the Matterhorn, when Queensberry's brother was killed. High mountains were with the Elliots a hereditary passion, and as an Eton boy Melgund had begun his mountaineering career by ascending the Breithorn, the peak which his father had, thirty years earlier as an Eton boy, ascended with his father long before there was an inn at Zermatt, or the Alpine Club had been dreamed of. He came of age on July 9, 1866, on the top of the Lyskamm. It is significant that the only extracts copied into his early journals are a poem by the Rev. Arthur G. Butler defending the assault on the Matterhorn when Lord Francis Douglas was killed:--

"We were not what we are Without that other fiery element-- The love, the thirst for venture, and the scorn That aught should be too great for mortal powers";

and the great speech of Claverhouse to Morton in Old Mortality:--

"When I think of death as a thing worth thinking of, it is in the hope of pressing one day some well-fought and hard-won field of battle, and dying with the shout of victory in my ear--that would be worth dying for; and more, it would be worth having lived for!"

* Later Chief Justice of Calcutta, when Minto was Viceroy of India.

His love of mountains never left him, and his last climbing adventure was in 1900, when he delayed his journey through the Rockies at Glacier in order to ascend Mount Avalanche--to the amazement of the imported Swiss guides, who could not believe that the Governor-General would get out of his train after a prolonged official tour and spend eleven arduous hours climbing a mountain. He wrote in his journal: "Ascended Mount Avalanche: two guides. Started 6:30 a.m., reached the summit 12:30. Left again 1:30 p.m. and arrived Glacier House 4:40. Very hard climb. We came down roped together, and glissading down a severe slope came to grief and finished the glissade on our backs, but no damage done." He had taken the precaution of inscribing his name on a card which was placed inside a bottle and laid in the snow on the summit, on the chance of its coming to light as "the last message of the Governor-General" should anything untoward happen.

In November 1866 Melgund passed the final examination at Cambridge, and on 13th December took his degree and bade farewell to the University in characteristic fashion. Steeplechasing had been forbidden by the authorities till the men had gone down, so it happened that the race for the Fitzwilliam Whip and the bestowal of degrees took place on the same day. "The Whip" had been twice won by Cecil Legard, who expected to carry it off for the third time and therefore retain possession of the trophy. Melgund determined to bring off the double event. He duly appeared in cap and gown, but under his academical dress he wore boots and breeches, and his spurs were in his pocket. A cob was waiting outside the hall, and as soon as the ceremony was over he was in the saddle and galloping for Cottenham. He reached the course not a moment too soon; rushed to the weighing room as the bell for the race was ringing and the horses were leaving the paddock; mounted his horse "Rival" and galloped to the starting-post, getting into line just as the flag fell. It was a desperate race, neck and neck the whole way; a breathless second of silence; then shouts of excitement from Melgund's backers--Legard had been beaten by a head.

Melgund's next appearance in the Cambridge Senate House was forty-four years later, when he was given an honorary doctor's degree.