scholar,
and sure to be delighted to find any one so well qualified to
sympathize with him as young Walter Scott; and the affectionate
gratitude of the young pupil was never intermitted, so long as
his venerable master continued to live. I may mention, in
passing, that old Whale bore, in many particulars, a strong
resemblance to Dominie Sampson, though, it must be admitted,
combining more gentlemanly manners with equal classical lore,
and, on the whole, being a much superior sort of person. In the
intervals of school hours, it was our constant practice to walk
together by the banks of the Tweed, our employment continuing
exactly the same, for his stories seemed to be quite
inexhaustible. This intercourse continued during the summers of
the years 1783--84, but was broken off in 1785-86, when I went
into Edinburgh to College."

Perhaps the separate seat assigned to Walter Scott by the Kelso
schoolmaster was considered due to him as a temporary visitor from the
great Edinburgh seminary. Very possibly, however, the worthy Mr. Whale
thought of nothing but protecting his solitary student of Persius and
Tacitus from the chances of being jostled among the adherents of
Ruddiman and Cornelius Nepos.

Another of his Kelso schoolfellows was Robert Waldie (son of Mr.
Waldie of Henderside), and to this connection he owed, both while
quartered in the garden, and afterwards at Rosebank, many kind
attentions, of which he ever preserved a grateful recollection, and
which have left strong traces on every page of his works in which he
has occasion to introduce the Society of Friends. This young
companion's mother, though always called in the neighborhood "Lady
Waldie," belonged to that community; and the style of life and manners
depicted in the household of Joshua Geddes of Mount Sharon and his
amiable sister, in some of the sweetest chapters of Redgauntlet, is a
slightly decorated edition of what he witnessed under {p.102} her
hospitable roof. He records, in a note to the novel, the "liberality
and benevolence" of this "kind old lady" in allowing him to "rummage
at pleasure, and carry home any volumes he chose of her small but
valuable library;" annexing only the condition that he should "take at
the same time some of the tracts printed for encouraging and extending
the doctrines of her own sect. She did not," he adds, "even exact any
assurance that I would read the