ugh occasionally admitted into his sanctum--a damp little
room in an outhouse in which he slept, and in his leisure hours made
water-colour drawings and verses--it was but as an occasional visitor,
who, having a rude taste for literature and the fine arts, was just
worthy of being encouraged in this way. My year of toil had, however,
wrought wonders for me: it had converted me into a sober young man; and
William Ross now seemed to find scarce less pleasure in my company than
I did in his. Poor William! his name must be wholly unfamiliar to the
reader; and yet he had that in him which ought to have made it a known
one. He was a lad of genius--drew truthfully, had a nice sense of the
beautiful, and possessed the true poetic faculty; but he lacked health
and spirits, and was naturally of a melancholy temperament, and
diffident of himself. He was at this time a thin, pale lad, fair-haired,
with a clear waxen complexion, flat chest, and stooping figure; and
though he lasted considerably longer than could have been anticipated
from his appearance, in seven years after he was in his grave. He was
unfortunate in his parents; his mother, though of a devout family of the
old Scottish type, was an aberrant specimen;--she had fallen in early
youth, and had subsequently married an ignorant, half-imbecile labourer,
with whom she passed a life of poverty and unhappiness; and of this
unpromising marriage William was the eldest child. It was certainly not
from either parent he derived his genius. His maternal grandmother and
aunt were, however, excellent Christian women of superior intelligence,
who supported themselves by keeping a girls' school in the parish; and
William, who had been brought at an early age to live with them, and was
naturally a gentle-spirited, docile boy, had the advantage, in
consequence, of having that most important lesson of any education--the
lesson of a good example at home--set well before him. His boyhood had
been that of the poet: he had loved to indulge in his day-dreams in the
solitude of a deep wood beside his grandmother's cottage; and had
learned to write verses and draw landscapes in a rural locality in which
no one had ever written verses or drawn landscapes before. And finally,
as, in the north of Scotland, in those primitive times, the nearest
approach to an artist was a house-painter, William was despatched to
Cromarty, when he had grown tall enough for the work, to cultivate his
natural taste for