tion of my judgment, when
the magazine struggled into half-birth, and instantly sickened and
subsided into night. I had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart
was at that time somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to
break it; and she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my
cherished contributions in silence. I will not say that I was pleased
at this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the
work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste. I
cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary
interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my
share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed
their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than formerly,
having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the enterprise with some
graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the whole episode, I told
myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor the man ready; and to work
I went again with my penny version-books, having fallen back in one
day from the printed author to the manuscript student.

III

From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own
papers. The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my
best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it
remains invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would
print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any
worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly
to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this
volume of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener,
may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John
and Robert drew very close together in their lives; for John was
rough, he smelt of the windy brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked
of the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked
John the better of the two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the
Old Adam that pleases men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he
was a wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may
be, and however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch
that follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature,
whom, if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should
like well to draw again with a maturer touch. And as I think of him
and of John, I wonder in what other country two