same now. I
anticipate what this plantation and that one will presently be, if
only taken care of, and there is not a spot of which I do not watch
the progress. Unlike building, or even painting, or indeed any other
kind of pursuit, this has no end, and is never interrupted; but goes
on from day to day, and from year to year, with a perpetually
augmenting interest. Farming I hate. What have I to do with fattening
and killing beasts, or raising corn, only to cut it down, and to
wrangle with farmers about prices, and to be constantly at the mercy
of the seasons? There can be no such disappointments or annoyances in
planting trees."[43] Scott indeed regarded planting as a mode of so
moulding the form and colour of the outward world, that nature herself
became indebted to him for finer outlines, richer masses of colour,
and deeper shadows, as well as for more fertile and sheltered soils.
And he was as skilful in producing the last result, as he was in the
artistic effects of his planting. In the essay on the planting of
waste lands, he mentions a story,--drawn from his own experience,--of
a planter, who having scooped out the lowest part of his land for
enclosures, and "planted the wood round them in masses enlarged or
contracted as the natural lying of the ground seemed to dictate," met,
six years after these changes, his former tenant on the ground, and
said to him, "I suppose, Mr. R----, you will say I have ruined your
farm by laying half of it into woodland?" "I should have expected it,
sir," answered Mr. R----, "if you had told me beforehand what you were
going to do; but I am now of a very different opinion; and as I am
looking for land at present, if you are inclined to take for the
remaining sixty acres the same rent which I formerly gave for a
hundred and twenty, I will give you an offer to that amount. I
consider the benefit of the enclosing, and the complete shelter
afforded to the fields, as an advantage which fairly counterbalances
the loss of one-half of the land."[44]

And Scott was not only thoughtful in his own planting, but induced his
neighbours to become so too. So great was their regard for him, that
many of them planted their estates as much with reference to the
effect which their plantations would have on the view from Abbotsford,
as with reference to the effect they would have on the view from
their own grounds. Many was the consultation which he and his
neighbours, Scott of Gala, for instance, and