Note 16 — Chapter II · The Altyre Gardens—Home Interests—Our Mother’s Death—Early Influences—The Moray Floods.

Her eldest son, Penrose, was at that time in Canada with his regiment, the 71st Highlanders. He wrote from Montreal, 27th May 1842: “I feel as if crushed to the earth. She was too young and beautiful, and too necessary to her family to be taken from them.... Oh may we, her children, profit by every advice and the example she showed us daily.... There never was a mother who loved her children more than she, or who thought of the absent ones with such affection, as her own letters show.”