l men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for
Abana and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one
of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers
about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of
Scotland are incomparable in themselves--or I am only the more Scottish
to suppose so--and their sound and colour dwell for ever in the memory.
How often and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or
Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the bright
burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks in the den
behind Kingussie! I think shame to leave out one of these enchantresses,
but the list would grow too long if I remembered all; only I may not
forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for
all its pollutions, that Water of Leith of the many and well-named
mills--Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn
of pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless
trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from
Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss under the
Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a rock, where I
loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in its infancy
by subterranean pipes for the service of the sea-beholding city in the
plain. From many points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole
course and that of all its tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput
may visit all its corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be
breathed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent
cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it
would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland
sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river;
it would take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the
most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the
sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain _genius loci_, I am
condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (who
cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would
gladly carry the reader along with me.

John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the
Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering,
sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when