April 7.—­Made out my morning’s task; at one drove to Chiefswood, and walked home by the Rhymer’s Glen, Mar’s Lee, and Haxell-Cleugh.  Took me three hours.  The heath gets somewhat heavier for me every year—­but never mind, I like it altogether as well as the day I could tread it best.  My plantations are getting all into green leaf, especially the larches, if theirs may be called leaves, which are only a sort of hair, and from the number of birds drawn to these wastes, I may congratulate myself on having literally made the desert to sing.  As I returned, there was, in the phraseology of that most precise of prigs in a white collarless coat and chapeau bas, Mister Commissary Ramsay—­“a rather dense inspissation of rain.”  Deil care.

    “Lord, who would live turmoiled in the Court,
    That might enjoy such quiet walks as these?"[239]

Yet misfortune comes our way too.  Poor Laidlaw lost a fine prattling child of five years old yesterday.

It is odd enough—­Iden, the Kentish Esquire, has just made the ejaculation which I adopted in the last page, when he kills Cade, and posts away up to Court to get the price set upon his head.  Here is a letter come from Lockhart, full of Court news, and all sort of news,—­best is his wife is well, and thinks the child gains in health.

Lockhart erroneously supposes that I think of applying to Ministers about Charles, and that notwithstanding Croker’s terms of pacification I should find Malachi stick in my way.  I would not make such an application for millions; I think if I were to ask patronage it would [not] be through them, for some time at least, and I might have better access.[240]

April 8.—­We expect a raid of folks to visit us this morning, whom we must have dined before our misfortunes.  Save time, wine, and money, these misfortunes—­and so far are convenient things.  Besides, there is a dignity about them when they come only like the gout in its mildest shape, to authorise diet and retirement, the night-gown and the velvet shoe; when the one comes to chalkstones, and the other to prison, though, there would be the devil.  Or compare the effects of Sieur Gout and absolute poverty upon the stomach—­the necessity of a bottle of laudanum in the one case, the want of a morsel of meat in the other.

Laidlaw’s infant, which died on Wednesday, is buried to-day.  The people coming to visit prevent my going, and I am glad of it.  I hate funerals—­always did.  There is such a mixture of mummery with real grief—­the actual mourner perhaps heart-broken, and all the rest making solemn faces, and whispering observations on the weather and public news, and here and there a greedy fellow enjoying the cake and wine.  To me it is a farce full of most tragical mirth, and I am not sorry (like Provost Coulter[241]) but glad that I shall not see my own.  This is a most unfilial tendency of mine, for my father absolutely loved a