Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a change he would see!  The bright, broad laugh, the shrewd, jovial word, the man of the Parliament House and of the world, and, next step, moody, the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible; his shut mouth, like a child’s, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad:  he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding look.  As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, “How it raves and drifts!  On-ding o’ snaw,—­ay, that’s the word,—­on-ding—­” He was now at his own door, “Castle Street, No.39.”  He opened the door, and went straight to his den; that wondrous workshop, where, in one year, 1823, when he was fifty-two, he wrote “Peveril of the Peak,” “Quentin Durward,” and “St. Ronan’s Well,” besides much else.  We once took the foremost of our novelists, the greatest, we would say, since Scott, into this room, and could not but mark the solemnizing effect of sitting where the great magician sat so often and so long, and looking out upon that little shabby bit of sky, and that back green where faithful Camp lies.[1]

[Footnote 1:  This favorite dog “died about January, 1809, and was buried, in a fine moonlight night, in the little garden behind the house in Castle Street.  My wife tells me she remembers the whole family in tears about the grave, as her father himself smoothed the turf above Camp with the saddest face she had ever seen.  He had been engaged to dine abroad that day, but apologized on account of the death of ’a dear old friend.’”—­Lockhart’s Life of Scott.]

He sat down in his large, green morocco elbow-chair, drew himself close to his table, and glowered and gloomed at his writing apparatus, “a very handsome old box, richly carved, lined with crimson velvet, and containing ink-bottles, taper-stand, etc., in silver, the whole in such order that it might have come from the silversmith’s window half an hour before.”  He took out his paper, then, starting up angrily, said, “’Go spin, you jade, go spin.’  No, d—–­ it, it won’t do:—­

   ’My spinnin’-wheel is auld and stiff;
      The rock o’t wunna stand, sir;
    To keep the temper-pin in tiff
      Employs ower aft my hand, sir.’

I am off the fang.[2] I can make nothing of ‘Waverley’ to-day; I’ll awa’ to Marjorie.  Come wi’ me, Maida, you thief.”  The great creature rose slowly, and the pair were off, Scott taking a maud (a plaid) with him.  “White as a frosted plum-cake, by jingo!” said he, when he got to the street.  Maida gambolled and whisked among the snow; and her master strode across to Young Street, and through it to 1 North Charlotte Street, to the house of his dear friend, Mrs. William Keith of Corstorphine Hill, niece of Mrs. Keith of Ravelston, of whom he said at her death, eight years after, “Much tradition, and that of the best, has died with this excellent old lady, one of the few persons whose spirits and cleanliness and freshness of mind and body made old age lovely and desirable.”