September 12.—­Notwithstanding what is above said, I made out my task yesterday, or nearly so, by working after dinner.  After all, these interruptions are not such bad things; they make a man keen of the work which he is withheld from, and differ in that point much from the indulgence of an indisposition to labour in your own mind, which increases by indulgence. Les facheux seldom interrupt your purpose absolutely and entirely—­you stick to it for contradiction’s sake.

Well, I visited the spring in the morning, and completed my task afterwards.  As I slept for a few minutes in my chair, to which I am more addicted than I could wish, I heard, as I thought, my poor wife call me by the familiar name of fondness which she gave me.  My recollections on waking were melancholy enough.  These be

    “The airy tongues that syllable men’s names."[338]

All, I believe, have some natural desire to consider these unusual impressions as bodements of good or evil to come.  But alas! this is a prejudice of our own conceit.  They are the empty echoes of what is past, not the foreboding voice of what is to come.

I dined at the Club to-day at Selkirk, and acted as croupier.  There were eighteen dined; young men chiefly, and of course young talk.  But so it has been, will be, and must be.

September 13.—­Wrote my task in the morning, and thereafter had a letter from that sage Privy Councillor and booby of a Baronet,——.  This unutterable idiot proposes to me that I shall propose to the Dowager Duchess of ——­, and offers his own right honourable intervention to bring so beautiful a business to bear.  I am struck dumb with the assurance of his folly—­absolutely mute and speechless—­and how to prevent him making me further a fool is not easy, for the wretch has left me no time to assure him of the absurdity of what he proposes; and if he should ever hint at such a piece of d——­d impertinence, what must the lady think of my conceit or of my feelings!  I will write to his present quarters, however, that he may, if possible, have warning not to continue this absurdity.[339]

Dined at Major Scott, my cousin’s, where was old Lord Buchan.  He, too, is a prince of Bores, but age has tamed him a little, and like the giant Pope in the Pilgrim’s Progress, he can only sit and grin at Pilgrims as they go past, and is not able to cast a fank[340] over them as formerly.  A few quiet puns seem his most formidable infliction nowadays.

September 14.—­I should not have forgotten, among the memorabilia of yesterday, that Mr. Nasmyth, the dentist, and his family called, and I showed them the lions, for truly he that has rid a man of the toothache is well entitled to command a part of his time. Item, two young Frenchmen made their way to our sublime presence in guerdon of a laudatory copy of French verses sent up the evening before, by way of “Open Sesame,” I suppose.