2110-6-7-6

Ardwall, Gatehouse-of-Fleet Galloway

April 28th 1934

My dear John,

Very many thanks for your letter, and for all it says - so beautifully, so truly, and with so much comfort. What a revelation we have had in the past weeks of the sympathy and love with which we are surrounded! What strength and comfort we have had from it! I have had such kind letters also from your dear brother and sister, which I hope to answer soon - I think we must have a thousand letters, many of them most touching, all of them most kind.

Yours alone I sent on straight to Margaret where she is with her mother until Monday, because I know she would love it; the more so that your books gave such pleasure to her wee

son - the thirty nine steps, and John McNab especially - for the chase in all its forms was his glory.

It is a loss, John; and it leaves a void. But I'd be a very ungrateful man, and an even worse Christian than Ian if I did not lift eyes of praise to Heaven for all the multitude of blessings that have been given me. I am still happier and in better case than all except the favoured few of mankind - such as the saints.

My dread all through was for Margaret and thank God, it proved an unworthy fear. She and her son were bound together by a peculiar intensity of affection on both sides. It was a matter of pleasant chaff and joking in our family circle - the way that he was always bringing her flowers during the Edinburgh winter, and buying her

presents out of his pocket money and small tips, and taking her with him on his expeditions to shoot, and deer stalk and foxhunt, and search for flowers and wild birds eggs. With what devotion and as you truly say heroism, she watched over his sickbed. Herself under the strain of anxiety tightening into fear and almost into despair at the end she was the picture of calm and cheerfulness as long as she was in his sickroom: and she entertained him with his favourite books and talk so well, that except for a couple of days pain, and ten days prostration at the first onset of the disease he was in good spirits, with his usual cheerful outlook until his mind began to cloud

24 hours before the end.

I thought the end would turn her heart to stone: and now she is all acceptance of the loss in faith and in thankfulness for eighteen years of a life unclouded by trouble, and unstained by evil and full of brightness which shone on all his surrounding but upon herself most of all. It has brought out what I had never enough appreciated, the beauty and strength and the deep piety of her nature - which she was so reserved about.

Well John, you see, I have indeed cause to be thankful; and in the kindness of dear friends like you and Susie I am very happy.

I hope our poor friend John

Edgar is making progress. How good you are to him.

Ah, John, there is a man in an infinitely worse case than me. He is the real object of pity and help.

I do hope he is getting restored. When he is at all fit for it, some routine work should be invented for him. Unpaid cataloguing, say, at the Bodleian, of all the literature connected with the Loch Ness Monster. Some of my friends of weaker intellect and nothing to do and money to live on get jobs at Geneva as unpaid under-secretaries of the anti-poison gas commission of the League of Nations and such like. In fact, I think the League of Nations might well be turned into a sort of