--in even the latter stages of
his complaint; and after supporting and tending his dying comrade till
he sank, he himself suddenly broke down and died. And thus perished
unknown, and in the prime of his days, a man of sterling principle and
fine genius. I found employment enough for the few weeks which still
remained of the working season of this year, in hewing a tombstone for
my uncle James, on which I inscribed an epitaph of a few lines, that had
the merit of being true. It characterized the deceased--"James
Wright"--as "an honest, warm-hearted man, who had the happiness of
living without reproach, and of dying without fear."

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Loch Ness.

[12] This portrait of the Ness is, I fear, scarce true to the ordinary
character of the river. I had visited it during the previous winter, and
walked a few miles along its sides, when the tract of country through
which it flows lay bleached and verdureless, and steeped in the soaking
rain of weeks, and the stream itself, big in flood, roared from bank to
brae in its shallower reaches, or boiled sullen and turbid in many a
circling eddy in its darker pools. And my description somewhat
incongruously unites a sunlit summer landscape, rich in flower and
foliage, with the brown wintry river.

CHAPTER XX.

"This while my notion's ta'en a sklent,
To try my fate in guid black prent;
But still the mair I'm that way bent,
Something cries, Hoolie!
I red you, honest man, tak tent;
Ye'll shaw your folly."--BURNS.

My volume of verse passed but slowly through the press; and as I had
begun to look rather ruefully forward to its appearance, there was no
anxiety evinced on my part to urge it on. At length, however, all the
pieces were thrown into type; and I followed them up by a tail-piece in
prose, formed somewhat on the model of the preface of Pope--for I was a
great admirer, at the time, of the English written by the "wits of Queen
Anne"--in which I gave serious expression to the suspicion that, as a
writer of verse, I had mistaken my vocation.

"It is more than possible," I said, "that I have completely failed
in poetry. It may appear that, while grasping at originality of
description and sentiment, and striving to attain propriety of
expression, I have only been depicting common images, and embodying
obvious thoughts, and this, too, in inelegant language. Yet even in
this case, though dis