y, whose grace ripens the seeds we commit to
the earth, that our benefactions shall bear fruit. And now,
my Lord, asking your pardon for this discharge of my
conscience, and assuring your Grace I have no wish to
exchange my worsted gown, or the remote _Pisgah_ exchange of
a silk one, for the cloak of a Presbyterian parson, even
with the certainty of succeeding to the first of your
numerous Kirk-presentations, I take the liberty to add my
own opinion. The elder boys must be looked out and punished,
and the parents severely reprimanded, and the whole
respectable part of the town made sensible of the loss they
must necessarily sustain by the discontinuance of your
patronage. And at, or about the same time, I {p.146} should
think it proper if your Grace were to distinguish by any
little notice such Selkirk people working with you as have
their families under good order.

I am taking leave of Abbotsford _multum gemens_, and have
been just giving directions for planting upon _Turn-again_.
When shall we eat a cold luncheon there, and look at the
view, and root up the monster in his abyss? I assure you
none of your numerous vassals can show a finer succession of
_distant_ prospects. For the home-view--ahem!--We must wait
till the trees grow.

Ever your Grace's truly faithful

W. SCOTT.

While the abortive negotiation as to the exchequer was still pending,
Scott was visited, for the first time since his childish years, with a
painful illness, which proved the harbinger of a series of attacks,
all nearly of the same kind, continued at short intervals during more
than two years. Various letters, already introduced, have indicated
how widely his habits of life when in Edinburgh differed from those of
Abbotsford. They at all times did so to a great extent; but he had
pushed his liberties with a most robust constitution to a perilous
extreme while the affairs of the Ballantynes were laboring, and he was
now to pay the penalty.

This first serious alarm occurred towards the close of a merry
dinner-party in Castle Street (on the 5th of March), when Scott
suddenly sustained such exquisite torture from cramp in the stomach,
that his masculine powers of endurance gave way, and he retired from
the room with a scream of agony which electrified his guests. This
scene was often repe