poor old man at last. This, indeed, was a
contrivance; but the idea of the rest of the ballad was taken from an
old man, who had once been a sailor, and who was wont to come to my
mother's, in the rounds which he took in pursuit of charity at regular
periods of the year, so that we called him her pensioner.

"The summer vacations of college years I passed in the country,
sometimes residing with my mother, and eldest brother, at a small farm
which he had taken at the foot of the Lammermuir hills, in East-Lothian,
called Brookside, and sometimes, when I wished a variety, with another
brother, at Dryden, in Selkirkshire. At both places I had enough of
time, not only for study, but also for what I may call amusement. The
latter consisted in various literary projects which I entered upon, but
particularly those of a poetic kind, and the writing of letters to
friends with whom I regularly, and I may say also copiously
corresponded; for in these we did not merely express immediate thoughts
and feelings of a more personal nature, but remarked with vigorous
frankness upon many standard affairs of this scene of things. To this
general rule of the manner of my life at this time, however, I must
mention an exception. A college companion and I, thinking to advantage
ourselves, and perhaps others, took a school at Fisherrow. The
speculation in the end, as to money matters, served us nothing. It was
easier to get scholars than to get much if anything for teaching them.
Yet neither was the former, in some respects, so easy as might have been
expected. The offspring of man, in that locality, may be regarded as in
some measure amphibious. Boys and girls equally, if not already in the
sea, were, like young turtles, sure to be pointing towards it with an
instinct too intense to err. I never met, indeed, with a race of beings
believed, or even suspected to be rational, that, provided immediate
impulses and inclinations could be gratified, cared so thoroughly little
for consequences. On warm summer days, when we caused the school door to
stand open, it is not easy to say how much of intense interest this
simple circumstance drew towards it. The squint of the unsettled eye was
on the door, out at which the heart and all its inheritance was off and
away long previously, and the more than ordinarily propitious moment for
the limbs following was only as yet not arrived. When that moment came,
off went one, followed by another; and down the narrow