March 22.—­Yesterday I wrote to James Ballantyne, acquiescing in his urgent request to extend the two last volumes to about 600 each.  I believe it will be no more than necessary after all, but makes one feel like a dog in a wheel, always moving and never advancing.

March 23.—­When I was a child, and indeed for some years after, my amusement was in supposing to myself a set of persons engaged in various scenes which contrasted them with each other, and I remember to this day the accuracy of my childish imagination.  This might be the effect of a natural turn to fictitious narrative, or it might be the cause of it, or there might be an action and reaction, or it does not signify a pin’s head how it is.  But with a flash of this remaining spirit, I imagine my mother Duty to be a sort of old task-mistress, like the hag of the merchant Abudah, in the Tales of the Genii—­not a hag though, by any means; on the contrary, my old woman wears a rich old-fashioned gown of black silk, with ruffles of triple blonde-lace, and a coif as rich as that of Pearling Jean;[496] a figure and countenance something like Lady D.S.’s twenty years ago; a clear blue eye, capable of great severity of expression, and conforming in that with a wrinkled brow, of which the ordinary expression is a serious approach to a frown—­a cautionary and nervous shake of the head; in her withered hand an ebony staff with a crutch head,—­a Tompion gold watch, which annoys all who know her by striking the quarters as regularly as if one wished to hear them.  Occasionally she has a small scourge of nettles, which I feel her lay across my fingers at this moment, and so Tace is Latin for a candle.[497] I have 150 pages to write yet.

March 24.—­Does Duty not wear a pair of round old-fashioned silver buckles?  Buckles she has, but they are square ones.  All belonging to Duty is rectangular.  Thus can we poor children of imagination play with the ideas we create, like children with soap-bubbles.  Pity that we pay for it at other times by starting at our shadows.

    “Man but a rush against Othello’s breast.”

The hard work still proceeds, varied only by a short walk.

March 25.—­Hard work still, but went to Huntly Burn on foot, and returned in the carriage.  Walked well and stoutly—­God be praised!—­and prepared a whole bundle of proofs and copy for the Blucher to morrow; that damned work will certainly end some time or other.  As it drips and dribbles out on the paper, I think of the old drunken Presbyterian under the spout.

March 26.—­Despatched packets.  Colonel and Captain Ferguson arrived to breakfast.  I had previously determined to give myself a day to write letters; and, as I expect John Thomson to dinner, this day will do as well as another.  I cannot keep up with the world without shying a letter now and then.  It is true the greatest happiness I could think of would be to be rid of the world entirely.  Excepting my own family, I have little pleasure in the world, less business in it, and am heartily careless about all its concerns.  Mr. Thomson came accordingly—­not John Thomson of Duddingston, whom the letter led me to expect, but John Anstruther Thomson of Charlton [Fifeshire], the son-in-law of Lord Ch.-Commissioner.