ke--with whom he lived. We did not
become friends, for the _bickers_ were more agreeable to both parties
than any more pacific amusement; but we conducted them ever after
under mutual assurances of the highest consideration for each other."
Sir Walter adds--"Of five brothers, all healthy and promising in a
degree far beyond one whose infancy was visited by personal infirmity,
and whose health after this period seemed long very precarious, I am,
nevertheless, the only survivor. The best loved, and the best
deserving to be loved, who had destined this incident to be the
foundation of a literary composition, died 'before his day,' in a
distant and foreign land; and trifles assume an importance not their
own when connected with those who have been loved and lost."

During some part of his attendance on the High School, young Walter
spent one hour daily at a small separate seminary of writing and
arithmetic, kept by one Morton, where, as was, and I suppose continues
to be, the custom of Edinburgh, young girls came for instruction as
{p.089} well as boys; and one of Mr. Morton's female pupils has been
kind enough to set down some little reminiscences of Scott, who
happened to sit at the same desk with herself. They appear to me the
more interesting, because the lady had no acquaintance with him in the
course of his subsequent life. Her nephew, Mr. James (the accomplished
author of Richelieu), to whose friendship I owe her communication,
assures me, too, that he had constantly heard her tell the same things
in the very same way, as far back as his own memory reaches, many
years before he had ever seen Sir Walter, or his aunt could have
dreamt of surviving to assist in the biography of his early days.

"He attracted," Mrs. Churnside says, "the regard and fondness of all
his companions, for he was ever rational, fanciful, lively, and
possessed of that urbane gentleness of manner which makes its way to
the heart. His imagination was constantly at work, and he often so
engrossed the attention of those who learnt with him, that little
could be done--Mr. Morton himself being forced to laugh as much as the
little scholars at the odd turns and devices he fell upon; for he did
nothing in the ordinary way, but, for example, even when he wanted ink
to his pen, would get up some ludicrous story about sending his doggie
to the mill again. He used also to interest us in a more serious way,
by telling us the _visions_, as he called them, wh