ge and startling adventure, and furnished with an extraordinary
machinery of the wild and supernatural; and though all knew that Jock
made imagination supply, in his histories, the place of memory, not even
Ulysses or AEneas--men who, unless very much indebted to their poets,
must have been of a similar turn--could have attracted more notice at
the courts of Alcinuous or Dido, than Jock in the barrack. The workmen
used, on the mornings after big greater narratives, to look one another
full in the face, and ask, with a smile rather incipient than fully
manifest, whether "Jock wasna perfectly wonderfu' last nicht?"

He had several times visited the south of Scotland, as one of a band of
Highland reapers, for employment in his proper profession very often
failed poor Jock; and these journeys formed the grand occasions of his
adventures. One of his narratives commenced, I remember, with a
frightful midnight scene in a solitary churchyard. Jock had lost his way
in the darkness; and, after stumbling among burial-mounds and
tombstones, he had toppled into an open grave, which was of a depth so
profound, that for some time he failed to escape from it, and merely
pulled down upon himself, in his attempts to climb its loose sides,
musty skulls, and great thigh-bones, and pieces of decayed coffins. At
length, however, he did succeed in getting out, just as a party of
unscrupulous resurrectionists were in the act of entering the
burying-ground; and they, naturally enough preferring an undecayed
subject that had the life in it to preserve it fresh, to dead corpses
the worse for the keeping, gave him chase; and it was with the extremest
difficulty that, after scudding over wild moors and through dark woods,
he at length escaped them by derning himself in a fox-earth. The season
of autumnal labour over, he visited Edinburgh on his way north; and was
passing along the High Street, when, seeing a Highland girl on the
opposite side with whom he was intimate, and whom he afterwards married,
he strode across to address her, and a chariot coming whirling along the
street at the time at full speed, he was struck by the pole and knocked
down. The blow had taken him full on the chest; but though the bone
seemed injured, and the integuments became frightfully swollen and
livid, he was able to get up; and, on asking to be shown the way to a
surgeon's shop, his acquaintance the girl brought him to an under-ground
room in one of the narrow lanes of