I had to draw so much on imagination."

Next morning there appeared at breakfast John Ballantyne, who had at this time a shooting or hunting-box a few miles off in the vale of the Leader, and with him Mr. Constable, his guest; and it being a fine clear day, as soon as Scott had read the church service

and one of Jeremy Taylor's sermons, we all sallied out, before noon, on a perambulation of his upland territories, Maida and the rest of the favourites accompanying our march. At starting we were joined by the constant henchman, Tom Purdie, and I may save myself the trouble of any attempt to describe his appearance, for his master has given us an inimitably true one in introducing a certain personage of his Redgauntlet:-"He was, perhaps, sixty years old: yet his brow was not much furrowed, and his jet black hair was only grizzled, not whitened, by the advance of age. All his motions spoke strength unabated; and, though rather undersized, he had very broad shoulders, was square made, thinflanked, and apparently combined in his frame muscular strength and activity; the last somewhat impaired, perhaps, by years, but the first remaining in full vigour. A hard and harsh countenance; eyes far sunk under projecting eyebrows, which were grizzled like his hair; a wide mouth, furnished from ear to ear, with a range of unimpaired teeth of uncommon whiteness, and a size and breadth which might have become the jaws of an ogre, completed this delightful portrait." Equip this figure in Scott's cast-off green jacket, white hat, and drab trousers; and

imagine that years of kind treatment, comfort, and the honest consequence of a confidential grieve, had softened away much of the hardness and harshness originally impressed on the visage by anxious penury and the sinister habits of a black-fisher, and the Tom Purdie of 1820 stands before

us.

We were all delighted to see how completely Scott had recovered his bodily vigour, and none more so than Constable, who, as he puffed and panted after him up one ravine and down another, often stopped to wipe his forehead, and remarked that "it was not every author who should lead him such a dance." But Purdie's face shone with rapture as he observed how severely the swag-bellied bookseller's activity was tasked. Scott exclaiming exultingly, though perhaps for the tenth time, "This will be a glorious spring for our trees, Tom!" -"You may say that, Sheriff," quoth Tom, and then lingering a moment for Constable-" My certy," he added, scratching his head, " and I think it will be a grand season for our buiks too." But indeed Tom always talked of our buiks as if they had been as regular products of the soil as our aits and our birks. Having threaded, first the Hexilcleugh and then the Rhymer's Glen, we arrived at Huntly Burn, where the hospitality of the kind Weird. Sisters, as Scott called the Misses Ferguson, reanimated our exhausted bibliopoles, and gave them courage to extend their walk a little further down the same famous brook. Here there was a small cottage in a very sequestered situation, by making some little additions to which Scott thought it might be converted into a suitable summer residence for his daughter and future son-in-law. The details of that plan were soon settled-it was agreed on all hands that a sweeter scene of seclusion could not be fancied. He repeated some verses of Roger's "Wish," which paint the spot :

"Mine be a cot beside the hill

"A beehive's hum shall soothe my ear;

"A willowy brook that turns a mill, "With many a fall shall linger near,"

&c.

But when he came to the stanza"And Lucy at her wheel shall sing, "In russet gown and apron blue,"

he departed from the text, adding

"But if Bluestockings here you bring,

"The Great Unknown won't dine with you."

Johnny Ballantyne, a projecter to the core, was particularly zealous about this embryo establishment. Forseeing that he should have had walking enough ere he reached Huntly Burn, his dapper little Newmarket groom had been ordered to fetch Old Mortality thither, and now, mounted on his fine hunter, he capered about us, looking pallid and emaciated as a ghost, but as gay and cheerful as ever, and would fain have been permitted to ride over hedge and ditch to mark out the proper line of the future avenue. Scott admonished him that the country people, if they saw him at such work, would take the whole party for heathens; and, clapping spurs to his horse, he left us. "The Deil's in the bod," quoth Tom Purdie, " he'll be ower every yet atween this and Turnagay, though it be the Lord's-day. I wadna wonder if he were to be ceeted

before the session." "Be sure, Tam," cries Constable, " that ye egg on the Dominie to blaw up his father-I wouldna grudge a hundred miles o'gait to see the ne'er-do-weel on the stool, and neither, I'll be sworn, would the Sheriff." "Na, na," quoth the Sheriff, "we'll let sleeping dogs be, Tam."

As we walked homeward, Scott, being a little fatigued, laid his left hand on Tom's shoulder, and leaned heavily for support, chatting to his "Sunday-pony," as he called the affectionate fellow, just as freely as with the rest of the party; and Tom put in his word shrewdly and manfully, and grinned and grunted whenever the joke chanced to be within his apprehension. It was easy to see that his heart swelled within him from the moment that the Sheriff got his collar in his gripe.

There arose a little dispute between them about what tree or trees ought to be cut down in a hedge row that we passed, and Scott seemed somewhat ruffled with finding that some previous hints of his on that head had not been attended to. When we got into motion again, his hand was on Constable's shoulder, and Tom dropped a pace or two to the rear, until we approached a gate, when he jumped forward and opened it. "Give us a pinch of your snuff, Tom," quoth the Sheriff'; Tom's mull was produced, and the hand resumed its position. I was much diverted with Tom's behaviour when we at length reached Abbotsford. There were some garden chairs on the green in front of the cottage porch. Scott sat down on one of them to enjoy the view of his new tower as it gleam

ed in the sunset, and Constable and I did the like. Mr. Purdie remained lounging near us for a few minutes, and then asked the Sheriff to "speak a word." They withdrew together into the garden, and Scott presently rejoined us with a particularly comical expression of face. As soon as Tom was out of sight, he said-" Will ye guess what he has been saying, now? Well, this is a great satisfaction! Tom assures me that he has thought the matter over, and will take my advice about the thinning of that clump behind Captain Ferguson's."

I must not forget that, whoever might be at Abbotsford, Tom always appeared, at his master's elbow on Sunday, when dinner was over, and drank long life to the laird and the lady and all the good company, in a quaigh of whisky or a tumbler of wine, асcording to his fancy. I believe Scott has somewhere expressed in print his satisfaction that, among all the changes of our manners, the ancient freedom of personal intercourse may still be indulged between a master and an out-ofdoors servant; but, in truth, he kept by the old fashion even with domestic servants, to an extent

which I have hardly seen practised by any other gentleman. He conversed with his coachman if he sat by him, as he often did, on the box-with his footman, if he happened to be in the rumble; and when there was any very young lad in the household, he held it a point of duty to see that his employments were so arranged as to leave time for advancing his education, made him bring his copybook once a-week to the library, and examined him as to all that he was doing. Indeed, he did not confine this humanity to his own people. Any steady servant of a friend of his was soon considered as a sort of friend too, and was sure to have a kind little colloquy to himself at coming and going. With all this, Scott was a very rigid enforcer of disciplinecontrived to make it thoroughly understood by all about him that they must do their part by him as he did his by them; and the result was happy. I never knew any man so well served as he was-so carefully, so respectfully, and so silently; and I cannot help doubting if, in any department of human operations, real kindness ever compromised real dignity.