It opens with a picture of the author toiling across a bare common in a hot summer day, and reaching at last a ruined hut surrounded with tall trees, where he meets by appointment with a hale old man, with an iron-pointed staff lying beside him.  Then follows a retrospective account of their first acquaintance—­formed, it seems, when the author was at a village school; and his aged friend occupied “one room,—­the fifth part of a house” in the neighbourhood.  After this, we have the history of this reverend person at no small length.  He was born, we are happy to find, in Scotland—­among the hills of Athol; and his mother, after his father’s death, married the parish schoolmaster—­so that he was taught his letters betimes:  But then, as it is here set forth with much solemnity,

  From his sixth year, the boy, of whom I speak,
    In summer, tended cattle on the hills.

And again, a few pages after, that there may be no risk of mistake as to a point of such essential importance—­

  From early childhood, even, as hath been said,
  From his sixth year, he had been sent abroad,
  In summer, to tend herds:  Such was his task!

In the course of this occupation, it is next recorded, that he acquired such a taste for rural scenery and open air, that when he was sent to teach a school in a neighbouring village, he found it “a misery to him,” and determined to embrace the more romantic occupation of a Pedlar—­or, as Mr. Wordsworth more musically expresses it,

  A vagrant merchant bent beneath his load;

—­and in the course of his peregrinations had acquired a very large acquaintance, which, after he had given up dealing, he frequently took a summer ramble to visit.  The author, on coming up to this interesting personage, finds him sitting with his eyes half shut;—­and, not being quite sure whether he’s asleep or awake, stands “some minutes space” in silence beside him.  “At length,” says he, with his own delightful simplicity—­

  At length I hailed him—­seeing that his hat
  Was moist with water-drops, as if the brim
  Had newly scooped a running stream!—­
 —­“’Tis,” said I, “a burning day;
  My lips are parched with thirst;—­but you, I guess,
  Have somewhere found relief.”

Upon this, the benevolent old man points him out a well in a corner, to which the author repairs; and, after minutely describing its situation, beyond a broken wall, and between two alders that “grew in a cold damp nook,” he thus faithfully chronicles the process of his return—­

  My thirst I slaked—­and from the cheerless spot
  Withdrawing, straightway to the shade returned,
  Where sate the old man on the cottage bench.