scarce—­wife and children in want—­grouse abundant—­and his account of himself was so fresh and even humorous, that Scott let him off the penalty, and made him his shepherd.  He discharged these duties so faithfully that he came to be his master’s forester and factotum, and indeed one of his best friends, though a little disposed to tyrannize over Scott in his own fashion.  A visitor describes him as unpacking a box of new importations for his master “as if he had been sorting some toys for a restless child.”  But after Sir Walter had lost the bodily strength requisite for riding, and was too melancholy for ordinary conversation, Tom Purdie’s shoulder was his great stay in wandering through his woods, for with him he felt that he might either speak or be silent at his pleasure.  “What a blessing there is,” Scott wrote in his diary at that time, “in a fellow like Tom, whom no familiarity can spoil, whom you may scold and praise and joke with, knowing the quality of the man is unalterable in his love and reverence to his master.”  After Scott’s failure, Mr. Lockhart writes:  “Before I leave this period, I must note how greatly I admired the manner in which all his dependents appeared to have met the reverse of his fortunes—­a reverse which inferred very considerable alteration in the circumstances of every one of them.  The butler, instead of being the easy chief of a large establishment, was now doing half the work of the house at probably half his former wages.  Old Peter, who had been for five and twenty years a dignified coachman, was now ploughman in ordinary, only putting his horses to the carriage upon high and rare occasions; and so on with all the rest that remained of the ancient train.  And all, to my view, seemed happier than they had ever done before."[29] The illustration of this true confidence between Scott and his servants and labourers might be extended to almost any length.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 25:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iv. 6.]

[Footnote 26:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, iv. 3.]

[Footnote 27:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vi. 238—­242.]

[Footnote 28:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, vii. 218.]

[Footnote 29:  Lockhart’s Life of Scott, ix. 170.]

CHAPTER IX.

SCOTT’S PARTNERSHIPS WITH THE BALLANTYNES.

Before I make mention of Scott’s greatest works, his novels, I must say a few words of his relation to the Ballantyne Brothers, who involved him, and were involved by him, in so many troubles, and with whose name the story of his broken fortunes is inextricably bound up.  James Ballantyne, the elder brother, was a schoolfellow of Scott’s at Kelso, and was the editor and manager of the Kelso Mail, an anti-democratic journal, which had a fair circulation.  Ballantyne was something of an artist as regarded