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He was not able to take long walks, his references to climbing the hills are apocryphal, - but he had a Shetland pony and thus "roamed the dusky wild."

While in Aberdeen he fell in love with his cousin, Mary Duff, a charming hazel-eyed, brown-haired little girl. This was a serious matter to the impressionable boy. The memory of it, eight years later, when he was sixteen, was so intense that the report of her unromantic marriage to an Edinburgh wine-merchant almost threw him into convulsions.

He dated his love for the mountains from a visit to Ballater in the Highlands, where his mother took him when he was a boy of ten recovering from the scarlet fever. The lesson of her frenzies was not lost upon him. In his recollections he declares that he did not specially differ from other children, being neither tall nor short, dull nor witty, but rather lively, except in his sullen moods, and then he was always a devil. Once at table he even threatened to kill himself with a knife which he snatched up in his fury.

In May, 1798, the family title devolved upon him from his great-uncle, "the wicked lord," who, though he knew that "the little boy at Aberdeen" was to be his successor, had never done anything to relieve his necessities. It is said that when the schoolmaster in calling the roll prefixed the Latin for lord before Byron's name, he was so affected that he was unable to respond, but burst into tears.

Mrs. Byron's income after her husband's death had not been sufficient to keep her out of debt. Even at its atmost it was only £190 a year. She sold her furniture

for a little less than £75, and went with the young lord and his nurse to the ruined domain which, though valued at £90,000, yielded less than two per cent, and was in chancery. Surely a title given by the Stuarts, and thus stripped of its material accessories, was little to awaken pride.

Byron, in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan, thus described the Norman Abbey:—

An old, old monastery once, and now Still older mansion, — of a rich and rare

Mixed Gothic, such as artists all allow Few specimens yet left us can compare Withal it lies perhaps a little low, Because the monks preferred a hill behind, To shelter their devotions from the wind.

LVI.

It stood embosomed in a happy valley,

Crowned by high woodlands, where the Druid oak
Stood like Caractacus in act to rally

His host, with broad arms 'gainst the thunder-stroke;
And from beneath his boughs were seen to sally
The dappled foresters - as day awoke,
The branching stag swept down with all his herd,
To quaff a brook which murmured like a bird.

LVII.

Before the mansion lay a lucid lake,

Broad as transparent, deep, and freshly fed
By a river, which its softened way did take
In currents through the calmer water spread

Around the wild fowl nestled in the brake

And sedges, brooding in their liquid bed :
The woods sloped downwards to its brink, and stood
With their green faces fixed upon the flood.

LVIII.

Its outlet dashed into a deep cascade,

Sparkling with foam, until again subsiding,

Its shriller echoes

-

like an infant made

Quiet sank into softer ripples, gliding

Into a rivulet; and thus allayed,

Pursued its course, now gleaming, and now hiding Its windings through the woods; now clear, now blue, According as the skies their shadows threw.

LIX.

A glorious remnant of the Gothic pile

(While yet the church was Rome's) stood half apart In a grand arch, which once screened many an aisle. These last had disappeared — a loss to art :

The first yet frowned superbly o'er the soil,

And kindled feelings in the roughest heart,

Which mourned the power of time's or tempest's march In gazing on that venerable arch.

LX.

Within a niche, nigh to its pinnacle,

Twelve saints had once stood sanctified in stone;

But these had fallen, not when the friars fell,

But in the war which struck Charles from his throne, When each house was a fortalice

-as tell

The annals of full many a line undone, The gallant cavaliers who fought in vain

For those who knew not to resign or reign.

LXI.

But in a higher niche, alone, but crowned,

The Virgin Mother of the God-born Child, With her Son in her blessed arms, looked round, Spared by some chance when all beside was spoiled; She made the earth below seem holy ground.

This may be superstition, weak or wild,

But even the faintest relics of a shrine
Of any worship wake some thoughts divine

LXII.

A mighty window, hollow in the centre,
Shorn of its glass of thousand colorings,
Through which the deepened glories once could enter,
Streaming from off the sun like seraph's wings,
Now yawns all desolate now loud, now fainter,
The gale sweeps through its fretwork, and oft sings
The owl his anthem, where the silenced quire
Lie with their hallelujahs quenched like fire.

LXIII.

But in the noontide of the moon, and when

The wind is wingèd from one point of heaven, There moans a strange unearthly sound, which then Is musical — a dying accent driven

Through the huge arch, which soars and sinks again.
Some deem it but the distant echo given

Back to the night wind by the waterfall,
And harmonized by the old choral wall:

LXIV.

Others, that some original shape, or form

Shaped by decay, perchance, hath given the power (Though less than that of Memnon's statue, warm In Egypt's rays, to harp at a fixed hour)

To this gray ruin, with a voice to charm;
Sad, but serene, it sweeps o'er tree or tower;
The cause I know not, nor can solve; but such
The fact:- I've heard it, - once perhaps too much.

LXV.

Amidst the court a Gothic fountain played,
Symmetrical, but decked with carvings quaint –
Strange faces, like to men in masquerade,
And here perhaps a monster, there a saint:
The spring gushed through grim mouths of granite made,
And sparkled into basins, where it spent

Its little torrent in a thousand bubbles,

Like man's vain glory, and his vainer troubles.

LXVI.

The mansion's self was vast and venerable,

With more of the monastic than has been Elsewhere preserved: the cloisters still were stable, The cells, too, and refectory, I ween:

An exquisite small chapel had been able,

Still unimpaired, to decorate the scene;
The rest had been reformed, replaced, or sunk,
And spoke more of the baron than the monk.

But the "huge halls, long galleries, spacious cham bers" were scarcely fit for habitation, and Mrs. Byron took lodgings for a year in Nottingham. During this time an unskilful surgeon attempted to remedy Byron's lameness, but with only ill results. It is said that the boy played a trick upon him by writing some gibberish words and asking him what the language was. ian," replied the quack.

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