d I just don't happen to be among them; but I have one
stool for myself, you see, and, now that I have unshipped my desk,
another for a visitor, and so get on well enough."

I related briefly the story of my intimacy with his brother; and we were
soon on such terms as to be in a fair way of emptying a bottle of rum
together.

"You remind me of old times," said my new acquaintance. "I am weary of
these illiterate, boisterous, longsided Americans, who talk only of
politics and dollars. And yet there are first-rate men among them too. I
met, some years since, with a Philadelphia printer, whom I cannot help
regarding as one of the ablest, best-informed men I ever conversed with.
But there is nothing like general knowledge among the average class; a
mighty privilege of conceit, however."

"They are just in that stage," I remarked, "in which it needs all the
vigour of an able man to bring his mind into anything like cultivation.
There must be many more facilities of improvement ere the mediocritist
can develop himself. He is in the egg still in America, and must sleep
there till the next age.--But when last heard you of your brother?"

"Why," he replied, "when all the world heard of him--with the last
number of _Ruddiman's Magazine_. Where can you have been bottled up from
literature of late? Why, man, Robert stands first among our Scotch
poets."

"Ah! 'tis long since I have anticipated something like that for him," I
said; "but, for the last two years, I have seen only two books,
Shakspeare and 'The Spectator.' Pray, do show me some of the magazines."

The magazines were produced; and I heard, for the first time, in a
foreign land and from the recitation of the poet's brother, some of the
most national and most highly-finished of his productions. My eyes
filled and my heart wandered to Scotland and her cottage homes, as,
shutting the book, he repeated to me, in a voice faltering with emotion,
stanza after stanza of the "Farmer's Ingle."

"Do you not see it?--do you not see it all?" exclaimed my companion;
"the wide smoky room, with the bright turf fire, the blackened rafters
shining above, the straw-wrought settle below, the farmer and the
farmer's wife, and auld grannie and the bairns. Never was there truer
painting; and, oh, how it works on a Scotch heart! But hear this other
piece."

He read "Sandy and Willie."

"Far, far ahead of Ramsay," I exclaimed. "More imagination, more spirit,
more intellect, and as much