y with which I regarded the
easy movements and elastic steps of my more happily formed brethren.
Alas!" he adds, "these goodly barks have all perished in life's wide
ocean, and only that which seemed, as the naval phrase goes, so little
seaworthy, has reached the port when the tempest is over." How
touching to compare with this passage that in which he records his
pride in being found before he left the High School one of the
boldest {p.085} and nimblest climbers of "the kittle nine stanes," a
passage of difficulty which might puzzle a chamois-hunter of the Alps,
its steps, "few and far between," projected high in air from the
precipitous black granite of the Castle rock. But climbing and
fighting could sometimes be combined, and he has in almost the same
page dwelt upon perhaps the most favorite of all these juvenile
exploits--namely, "the manning of the Cowgate Port,"--in the season
when snowballs could be employed by the young scorners of discipline
for the annoyance of the Town-guard. To understand fully the feelings
of a High School boy of that day with regard to those ancient
Highlanders, who then formed the only police of the city of Edinburgh,
the reader must consult the poetry of the scapegrace Fergusson. It was
in defiance of their Lochaber axes that the Cowgate Port was
manned--and many were the occasions on which its defence presented a
formidable mimicry of warfare. "The gateway," Sir Walter adds, "is now
demolished, and probably most of its garrison lie as low as the
fortress! To recollect that I, however naturally disqualified, was one
of these juvenile dreadnoughts, is a sad reflection for one who cannot
now step over a brook without assistance."

I am unwilling to swell this narrative by extracts from Scott's
published works, but there is one juvenile exploit told in the General
Preface to the Waverley Novels, which I must crave leave to introduce
here in his own language, because it is essentially necessary to
complete our notion of his schoolboy life and character. "It is well
known," he says, "that there is little boxing at the Scottish schools.
About forty or fifty years ago, however, a far more dangerous mode of
fighting, in parties or factions, was permitted in the streets of
Edinburgh, to the great disgrace of the police, and danger of the
parties concerned. These parties were generally formed from the
quarters of the town in which the combatants resided, {p.086} those
of a particular square or