And so, in 1826, she had made her choice, and had become the bride
of the rough-spoken, domineering Scotsman who had to face the
world with nothing but his creative brain and his stubborn
independence. She had put aside all immediate thought of London
and its lures; she was going to cast in her lot with Carlyle's,
largely as a matter of calculation, and believing that she had
made the better choice.

She was twenty-six and Carlyle was thirty-two when, after a brief
residence in Edinburgh, they went down to Craigenputtock. Froude
has described this place as the dreariest spot in the British
dominions:

The nearest cottage is more than a mile from it; the elevation,
seven hundred feet above the sea, stunts the trees and limits the
garden produce; the house is gaunt and hungry-looking. It stands,
with the scanty fields attached, as an island in a sea of morass.
The landscape is unredeemed by grace or grandeur--mere undulating
hills of grass and heather, with peat bogs in the hollows between
them.

Froude's grim description has been questioned by some; yet the
actual pictures that have been drawn of the place in later years
make it look bare, desolate, and uninviting. Mrs. Carlyle, who
owned it as an inheritance from her father, saw the place for the
first time in March, 1828. She settled there in May; but May, in
the Scottish hills, is almost as repellent as winter. She herself
shrank from the adventure which she had proposed. It was her
husband's notion, and her own, that they should live there in