er
to the _Civil Engineers' and Architects' Journal_, 1862.

[14] "Nothing was said, but I was _looked out of countenance_," he
says in a letter.

[15] Ill-formed--ugly.--[R. L. S.]

[16] This is an incurable illusion of my grandfather's; he always
writes "distended" for "extended." [R. L. S.]

ADDITIONAL MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

ADDITIONAL MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

I

RANDOM MEMORIES

I. THE COAST OF FIFE

Many writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the
first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are
more often agreeably exciting. Misery--or at least misery unrelieved--is
confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the "dreadful
looking-for" of departure; when the old life is running to an end, and
the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun; and to the pain of
an imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious
pre-existence. The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of
semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the church-bells upon a Sunday, the
thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field--what a
sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar
circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems
to him, but from without. I was proud and glad to go to school; had I
been let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but there was
around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: "Poor
little boy, he is going away--unkind little boy, he is going to leave
us"; so the unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and
reproach. And at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn,
and at a place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always
autumn and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I
saw--the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon
the hill, the woody hillside garden--a look of such a piercing sadness
that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of
miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with
consolations--we two were alone in all that was visible of the London
Road: two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow--and she fawned upon the
weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment, watching the effect, it
seemed, with motherly eyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the story of
my