; and I am left alone. I must needs go up and see some
operations about the spring which supplies us with water, though I
calculate my presence is not very necessary. So now--to work--to work.

But I reckoned without my host, or, I should rather say, without my
_guest_. Just as I had drawn in my chair, fitted a new "Bramah" on the
stick, and was preparing to feague it away, I had a call from the son of
an old friend, Mr. Waldie of Henderland. As he left me, enter young
Whytbank and Mr. Auriol Hay[337] of the Lyon Office, and we had a long
armorial chat together, which lasted for some time--then the library was
to be looked at, etc. So, when they went away, I had little better to do
than to walk up to the spring which they are digging, and to go to my
solitary dinner on my return.

_September_ 12.--Notwithstanding what is above said, I made out my task
yesterday, or nearly so, by working after dinner. After all, these
interruptions are not such bad things; they make a man keen of the work
which he is withheld from, and differ in that point much from the
indulgence of an indisposition to labour in your own mind, which
increases by indulgence. _Les facheux_ seldom interrupt your purpose
absolutely and entirely--you stick to it for contradiction's sake.

Well, I visited the spring in the morning, and completed my task
afterwards. As I slept for a few minutes in my chair, to which I am more
addicted than I could wish, I heard, as I thought, my poor wife call me
by the familiar name of fondness which she gave me. My recollections on
waking were melancholy enough. These be

"The airy tongues that syllable men's names."[338]

All, I believe, have some natural desire to consider these unusual
impressions as bodements of good or evil to come. But alas! this is a
prejudice of our own conceit. They are the empty echoes of what is past,
not the foreboding voice of what is to come.

I dined at the Club to-day at Selkirk, and acted as croupier. There were
eighteen dined; young men chiefly, and of course young talk. But so it
has been, will be, and must be.

_September_ 13.--Wrote my task in the morning, and thereafter had a
letter from that sage Privy Councillor and booby of a Baronet,----. This
unutterable idiot proposes to me that I shall propose to the Dowager
Duchess of ----, and offers his own right honourable intervention to
bring so beautiful a business to bear. I am struck dumb with the
assurance of his folly--absol