A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to be neglected.  But they were neglected till we had learned how—­

   “The sable score of fingers four
      Remains on that board impressed,
   And for evermore that lady wore
      A covering on her wrist.”

We did not know nor ask the poet’s name.  Children, probably, say very little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, Sir Richard of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and the moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever since, and hardly need to be revived by looking at “The Eve of St. John.”

Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was, how good, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last, and he wore his heart away for honour’s sake.  And we were given the “Lay,” and “The Lady of the Lake.”  It was my father who first read “Tam o’ Shanter” to me, for which I confess I did not care at that time, preferring to take witches and bogies with great seriousness.  It seemed as if Burns were trifling with a noble subject.  But it was in a summer sunset, beside a window looking out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three Brethren’s Cairn, that I first read, with the dearest of all friends, how—­

   “The stag at eve had drunk his fill
   Where danced the moon on Monan’s rill,
   And deep his midnight lair had made
   In lone Glenartney’s hazel shade.”

Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the chase, till—­

   “Few were the stragglers, following far,
   That reached the lake of Vennachar,
   And when the Brig of Turk was won,
   The foremost horseman rode alone.”

From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of Scott in one’s pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection of a boy’s treasures.  Scott certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the Mauth Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small boy in wakeful hours. {1} After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning one’s first lessons in history from the “Tales of a Grandfather,” nobody, one hopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr. Leslie Stephen, who is not sentimental.  Scott is not an author like another, but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not ask who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of Madame d’Aulnoy.  Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with his reivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh; at Newark Tower we saw “the embattled portal arch”—­

   “Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
   Had oft rolled back the tide of war,”—­

just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless cottage whence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the Niger, and at Oakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.