Memoirs of a Highland Lady

Petty and boring

This is quite possibly the very best anecdote of the entire book. Writing of Lovat, the chief of the Clan Fraser visiting at Cluny...

...their servants told ours they had had a hard matter to get their master away, for he was subject to strange whims, and he taken it into his head when he was there that he was a turkey hen, and so he had made a nest of straw in his carriage and filled it with eggs and a large stone, and there he sat hatching, never leaving his station save twice a day like other fowl, and having his supplies of food brought to him. They had at last to get the Lady Cluny's henwife to watch a proper moment to throw out all these eggs and to put some young chickens in their place, when Lovat, satisfied he had accomplished his task, went about clucking and strutting with wonderful ride in the midst of them, running about to collect his flock, flapping the tails of his coat as the hens do their wings in like circumstances. He was quite sane in conversation generally, rather an agreeable man I heard them say, and would be as steady as other people for a certain length of time; but every now and then he took these strange fancies, when his wife had much ado to bring him out of them. (Chapter V. 1807-1809, p. 113)

Overall, the book is most interesting to scholars of Scottish history and her descendants though bits of nineteenth-century life come through such as the appalling child rearing practices. She describes her baby brother being given a daily dose of whiskey by his nurse, all the young children being thrown every morning into a cold tub of water, which in winter had ice in it, and her father using a horse whip on them when they refused to eat some nasty gruel that became their standard breakfast for a while. ( )