why the child was sent to reside with his grandfather—­the speculative grandfather, who had doubled his capital by buying a racehorse instead of sheep—­at Sandy-Knowe, near the ruined tower of Smailholm, celebrated afterwards in his ballad of The Eve of St. John, in the neighbourhood of some fine crags.  To these crags the housemaid sent from Edinburgh to look after him, used to carry him up, with a design (which she confessed to the housekeeper)—­due, of course, to incipient insanity—­of murdering the child there, and burying him in the moss.  Of course the maid was dismissed.  After this the child used to be sent out, when the weather was fine, in the safer charge of the shepherd, who would often lay him beside the sheep.  Long afterwards Scott told Mr. Skene, during an excursion with Turner, the great painter, who was drawing his illustration of Smailholm tower for one of Scott’s works, that “the habit of lying on the turf there among the sheep and the lambs had given his mind a peculiar tenderness for these animals, which it had ever since retained.”  Being forgotten one day upon the knolls when a thunderstorm came on, his aunt ran out to bring him in, and found him shouting, “Bonny! bonny!” at every flash of lightning.  One of the old servants at Sandy-Knowe spoke of the child long afterwards as “a sweet-tempered bairn, a darling with all about the house,” and certainly the miniature taken of him in his seventh year confirms the impression thus given.  It is sweet-tempered above everything, and only the long upper lip and large mouth, derived from his ancestress, Meg Murray, convey the promise of the power which was in him.  Of course the high, almost conical forehead, which gained him in his later days from his comrades at the bar the name of “Old Peveril,” in allusion to “the peak” which they saw towering high above the heads of other men as he approached, is not so much marked beneath the childish locks of this miniature as it was in later life; and the massive, and, in repose, certainly heavy face of his maturity, which conveyed the impression of the great bulk of his character, is still quite invisible under the sunny ripple of childish earnestness and gaiety.  Scott’s hair in childhood was light chestnut, which turned to nut brown in youth.  His eyebrows were bushy, for we find mention made of them as a “pent-house.”  His eyes were always light blue.  They had in them a capacity, on the one hand, for enthusiasm, sunny brightness, and even hare-brained humour, and on the other for expressing determined resolve and kindly irony, which gave great range of expression to the face.  There are plenty of materials for judging what sort of a boy Scott was.  In spite of his lameness, he early taught himself to clamber about with an agility that few children could have surpassed, and to sit his first pony—­a little Shetland, not bigger than a large Newfoundland dog, which used to come into the house to be fed by him—­even in gallops on very rough ground.