Memory Hold-The-Door by John Buchan — Read

Oxford enabled me to discover Scotland. Before I came up I had explored a great part of the Lowlands with the prosaic purpose of catching trout; but apart from my own Borders, the land, though I was steeped in its history, made no special appeal. Scottish literature, except the ballads and Sir Walter Scott, was scarcely known to me, and I had read very little of Robert Burns. But now as a temporary exile I acquired all the characteristics of the Scot abroad. I became a fervent admirer of Bums and a lover of Dunbar and the other poets of the Golden Age. I cultivated a sentiment for all things Scottish and brought the Highlands and the Isles into the orbit of my interest. A quarter of my blood was Highland and in that I developed a new pride, for it was a time when people talked of the "Celtic twilight," and Mr. Yeats had just published his _Wind Among the Reeds_. Oxford was full of Scotsmen of every type -- studious Scots, orgiastic Scots, rhetorical Scots who talked in the Union, robustious Scots from the football teams. The result was a new Caledonian Club. An earlier institution had been suppressed some years before by the University authorities after a carnival of special disorder. Some of us reconstituted it on an austere basis. It was limited to members with a proven Scots descent on both sides for at least three generations; an English club in the University, which adopted the same principle, could only find two who passed the test conditions! We specialised in vintage clarets and dined in a uniform of green and purple, intended to represent the thistle in flower. _Semel insanivimus omnes_.

But the real Scotland for me was discovered in my spring walking tours and my summer holidays. I had been a miserable headachy little boy, but at the age of five I had a serious carriage accident, when my skull was fractured, and I lay for the better part of a year in bed. I arose a new child, and throughout all my youth I was as hardy as a seal; indeed, apart from dysentery and a slight malaria in South Africa, I scarcely had an ailment until the War. I was lean and tough in body, accustomed to sleep out of doors in any weather, including December frosts, and, though never an athlete, capable of a good deal of physical endurance. Once I walked sixty-three miles on end in the Galloway hills. It was my custom in the long vacations to bury myself in the moorlands, taking up my quarters in a shepherd's cottage. There I rose early, worked for five or six hours, and then went fishing until the summer midnight. I throve on a diet of oatmeal, mutton and strong tea, and, with the habit to which I have already referred of linking philosophy with terrestrial objects, the works of Aristotle are for ever bound up for me with the smell of peat reek and certain stretches of granite and heather.