arming appearance. They overtook us on a stretch of heath,
reined up as they came alongside, and accompanied us for perhaps a
quarter of an hour before they galloped off again across the hillsides
to our left. Great was my amazement to find the unconquerable Mr. Sim
thaw immediately on the accost of this strange gentleman, who hailed him
with a ready familiarity, proceeded at once to discuss with him the
trade of droving and the prices of cattle, and did not disdain to take a
pinch from the inevitable ram's horn. Presently I was aware that the
stranger's eye was directed on myself; and there ensued a conversation,
some of which I could not help overhearing at the time, and the rest
have pieced together more or less plausibly from the report of Sim.

"Surely that must be an _amateur drover_ ye have gotten there?" the
gentleman seems to have asked.

Sim replied I was a young gentleman that had a reason of his own to
travel privately.

"Well, well, ye must tell me nothing of that. I am in the law, you know,
and _tace_ is the Latin for a candle," answered the gentleman. "But I
hope it's nothing bad."

Sim told him it was no more than debt.

"O Lord, if that be all!" cried the gentleman; and turning to myself,
"Well, sir," he added, "I understand you are taking a tramp through our
forest here for the pleasure of the thing?"

"Why, yes, sir," said I; "and I must say I am very well entertained."

"I envy you," said he. "I have jogged many miles of it myself when I was
younger. My youth lies buried about here under every heather-bush, like
the soul of the licentiate Lucius. But you should have a guide. The
pleasure of this country is much in the legends, which grow as plentiful
as blackberries." And directing my attention to a little fragment of a
broken wall no greater than a tombstone, he told me, for an example, a
story of its earlier inhabitants. Years after it chanced that I was one
day diverting myself with a Waverley Novel, when what should I come upon
but the identical narrative of my green-coated gentleman upon the moors!
In a moment the scene, the tones of his voice, his northern accent, and
the very aspect of the earth and sky and temperature of the weather,
flashed back into my mind with the reality of dreams. The unknown in the
green coat had been the Great Unknown! I had met Scott; I had heard a
story from his lips; I should have been able to write, to claim
acquaintance, to tell him that his legend still t