means a delver, or one who digs underground.  You must be a Dutchman.”  I told him that my ancestors had come over from Holland a couple of centuries ago, and I was proud of my lineage; for my grandfather, Glen Cuyler, was a descendant of Hendrick Cuyler, one of the early Dutch settlers of Albany, who came there in 1667.  “Ah,” said he, “the Dootch are the brawvest people of modern times.  The world has been rinnin’ after a red rag of a Frenchman; but he was nothing to William the Silent.  When Pheelip of Spain sent his Duke of Alva to squelch those Dutchmen they joost squelched him like a rotten egg—­aye, they did.”

I asked him why he didn’t visit America, and told him that I had observed his name registered at Ambleside, on Lake Windermere.  “Nae, nae,” said he, “I never scrabble my name in public places.”  I explained that it was on the hotel register that I had seen “Thomas Carlyle.”  “It was not mine,” he replied, “I never travel only when I ride on a horse in the teeth of the wind to get out of this smoky London.  I would like to see America.  You may boast of your Dimocracy, or any other ’cracy, or any other kind of political roobish, but the reason why your laboring folk are so happy is that you have a vast deal of land for a very few people.”  In this racy, picturesque vein he ran on for an hour in the most cordial, good humor.  He was then in his prime, hale and athletic, with a remarkably keen blue eye, a strong lower jaw and stiff iron gray hair, brushed up from a capacious forehead; and he had a look of a sturdy country deacon dressed up on a Sunday morning for church.  He was very carefully attired in a new suit that day for visiting, and, as I rose to leave, he said to me:  “I am going up into London and I will walk wi’ ye.”  We sallied out and he strode the pavement with long strides like a plowman.  I told him I had just come from the land of Burns, and that the old man at the native cottage of the poet had drunk himself to death by drinking to the memory of Burns.

At this Carlyle laughed loudly, and remarked:  “Was that the end of him?  Ah, a wee bit drap will send a mon a lang way.”  He then told me that when he was a lad he used to go into the Kirkyard at Dumfries and, hunting out the poet’s tomb, he loved to stand and just read over the name—­“Rabbert Burns”—­“Rabbert Burns.”  He pronounced the name with deep reverence.  That picture of the country lad in his earliest act of hero-worship at the grave of Burns would have been a good subject for the pencil of Millais or of Holman Hunt.  At the corner of Hyde Park I parted from Mr. Carlyle, and watched him striding away, as if, like the De’il in “Tam O’Shanter,” he had “business on his hand.”

Thirty years afterwards, in June, 1872, I felt an irrepressible desire to see the grand old man once more, and I accordingly addressed him a note requesting the favor of a few minutes’ interview.  His reply was, perhaps, the briefest letter ever written.  It was simply: