Very dull morning : bright from 1 till 2 then dull again + raining at night. Only saw a few town cases walking. Banked some money. Helen1 came home looking very well indeed. Baptie2 met her with the car at Gala. Did some more work at record cards + finished [the letter] T. Pollok3 sent me Lord Ernest Hamilton’s book of reminiscences4, with portraits of the old old + the old Duke + Duchess, on loan.
1 Helen Frances ‘Mousey’ Muir (1880-1963), Dr Muir’s third daughter and sometime housekeeper, who had been away from Selkirk for a long time since she and Dr Muir travelled south to stay with Muir relations in Surrey on 16 July 1923.
2 Thomas Baptie (1860-1929), driver and handyman for Dr Muir.
3 John Pollok (1858-1938), sometime Town Clerk, Procurator Fiscal, and Clerk to the Property & Income Tax Commissioners.
4 Lord Ernest William Hamilton (1858-1939), soldier, politician, author, fascist fellow-traveller and M.P. for Tyrone North 1885-1892. The book that best fits here is Hamilton’s memoir ‘Forty Years On’ but Hamilton was the author of novels including ‘The Outlaws of the Marches’ and ‘The Mawkin of the Flow’ (set in the Scottish Borders in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) and ‘Mary Hamilton’ based on Mary Hamilton or The Fower Maries, Child Ballad 173, Roud 79. After the First World War Hamilton published ‘The Soul of Ulster’ in which he argued that Ulster Protestants are descended from Scottish Border Reivers.
[Source: Scottish Borders Archives & Local History Service SBA/657/26, Dr J S Muir of Selkirk, medical practitioner, journal for 1923]
Rumbling Clint's Scottish Notes 