Dear Mrs Lorimer,
Will you accept this sketch as a slight mark of my sense of your constant kindness, and a slighter tribute to the memory of one whose name you bear? I hoped to have sent it to my old colleague and friend, whose interest in the history and the people, the future and the past, of Fife, was keen as that if its natives. But this may not be. He regarded the History of Fife, as I have tried to do, not as a subject for the library of an antiquary, but as a Miniature of the History of Scotland. The History if Scotland was in his eyes not a dead language, but the expression of Scottish life and character.
A happy opportunity enabled him to restore a bit of that history, without using the imperfect medium of words, in the better way of a thoughtful deed, by repairing the roof-free and rekindling the hearths of one of the deserted castles of Fife. To make the past live in the present, and for the use of the future, is not this the aim which, in spite of some dark passages, renders history a hopeful study?
