old in my head makes me cough and
sneeze like the Dragon of Wantley. The Advocates' Bill[383] is read a
third time. I hardly know whether to wish it passed or no, and am
therefore _in utrumque paratus_.

_June_ 27.--In the morning worked as usual at proofs and copy of my
infernal _Demonology_--a task to which my poverty and not my will
consents. About twelve o'clock I went to the country to take a day's
relaxation. We (i.e. Mr. Cadell, James Ballantyne, and I) went to
Prestonpans, and, getting there about one, surveyed the little village,
where my aunt and I were lodgers for the sake of sea-bathing in 1778, I
believe. I knew the house of Mr. Warroch, where we lived,--a poor
cottage, of which the owners and their family are extinct. I recollected
my juvenile ideas of dignity attendant on the large gate, a black arch
which lets out upon the sea. I saw the church where I yawned under the
inflictions of a Dr. M'Cormick, a name in which dulness seems to have
been hereditary. I saw the Links where I arranged my shells upon the
turf, and swam my little skiffs in the pools. Many comparisons between
the man, and the recollections of my kind aunt, of old George Constable,
who, I think, dangled after her; of Dalgetty, a veteran half-pay
lieutenant, who swaggered his solitary walk on the parade, as he called
a little open space before the same pool. We went to Preston, and took
refuge from a thunder-plump in the old tower. I remembered the little
garden where I was crammed with gooseberries, and the fear I had of
Blind Harry's spectre of Fawdon showing his headless trunk at one of
the windows. I remembered also a very good-natured pretty girl (my Mary
Duff), whom I laughed and romped with and loved as children love. She
was a Miss Dalrymple, daughter of Lord Westhall,[384] a Lord of Session;
was afterwards married to Anderson of Winterfield, and her daughter is
now [the spouse] of my colleague Robert Hamilton. So strangely are our
cards shuffled. I was a mere child, and could feel none of the passion
which Byron alleges, yet the recollection of this good-humoured
companion of my childhood is like that of a morning dream, nor should I
now greatly like to dispel it by seeing the original, who must now be
sufficiently time-honoured.

Well, we walked over the field of battle, saw the Prince's Park, Cope's
Loan, marked by slaughter in his disastrous retreat, the thorn-tree
which marks the centre of the battle, and all besides that was