heir characters.

[Illustration: STREET IN EDINBURGH WHERE SCOTT PLAYED AS A BOY]

Every Saturday in fair weather, and more frequently during the
vacations, his father allowed him a holiday from the office. Walter and
a boy friend named John Irving used to take two or three books from the
public library of Edinburgh, and go out into the neighboring country, to
Salisbury Crags, Arthur's Seat, or to a height called Blackford Hill,
from which there was a splendid view of the Lowland country. There they
read the books together, Walter always a little ahead of his friend, and
obliged to wait at the end of every two pages for him to catch up. The
books were almost always stories of knights-errant; the romances of
Spenser, the "Castle of Otranto," and translations from such Italian
writers as Ariosto, were very popular.

Often the boys would climb high up over the rocks to find places where
they would be sheltered from the wind, and the harder the nooks were to
reach the better they liked them. Walter, in spite of his lameness, was
a good climber, and time and again, when it seemed as though they had
contrived to get into a place from which there was no way out, and must
call to passers-by for help, he would manage to discover some jutting
stone or crevice in the rock that allowed them finally to make a
perilous escape.

That sort of adventure appealed to the boy tremendously; he liked to try
to use his wits in grappling with some natural difficulty, as the heroes
of his stories so often had to do.

The boys devoured a great many books in these expeditions, which lasted
over two years, and Walter so mastered the pages that he read that he
could recite long passages from them to his friend weeks after they had
finished the stories. Finally they fell into the habit of making up
stories of knights for themselves, first Walter telling the adventures
of a knight to John, and leaving the hero in some very difficult
situation for John to rescue him from, and then John carrying on the
story with another adventure, and leaving the next rescue to his friend.
The stories went on from day to day, and week to week, because the boys
grew so fond of their heroes that neither had the heart to kill the
brave knight, and they could find no other way to bring his adventures
to an end.

Although Walter spent considerable time in his father's office, he was
still studying under a tutor with other boys, preparing for college. He
was a brilli