}
revisited the favorite scene, and the sadness of his looks when he
discovered that the "huge hill of leaves" was no more.

To keep up his scholarship while inhabiting _the garden_, he attended
daily, as he informs us, the public school of Kelso, and here he made
his first acquaintance with a family, two members of which were
intimately connected with the most important literary transactions of
his after-life--James Ballantyne, the printer of almost all his works,
and his brother John, who had a share in the publication of many of
them. Their father was a respectable tradesman in this pretty town.
The elder of the brothers, who did not long survive his illustrious
friend, was kind enough to make an exertion on behalf of this work,
while stretched on the bed from which he never rose, and dictated a
valuable paper of _memoranda_ from which I shall here introduce my
first extract:--

"I think," says James Ballantyne, "it was in the year 1783 that I
first became acquainted with Sir Walter Scott, then a boy about
my own age, at the Grammar School of Kelso, of which Mr. Lancelot
Whale was the Rector. The impression left by his manners was,
even at that early period, calculated to be deep, and I cannot
recall any other instance in which the man and the boy continued
to resemble each other so much and so long. Walter Scott was not
a constant schoolfellow at this seminary; he only attended it for
a few weeks during the vacation of the Edinburgh High School. He
was then, as he continued during all his after-life to be,
devoted to antiquarian lore, and was certainly the best
story-teller I had ever heard, either then or since. He soon
discovered that I was as fond of listening as he himself was of
relating; and I remember it was a thing of daily occurrence, that
after he had made himself master of his own lesson, I, alas,
being still sadly to seek in mine, he used to whisper to me,
'Come, slink over beside me, Jamie, and I'll tell you a story.' I
well recollect that he had a form, or seat, appropriated to
himself, the particular reason of which I cannot tell, but he was
always treated with a peculiar degree {p.101} of respect, not
by the boys of the different classes merely, but by the venerable
Master Lancelot himself, who, an absent, grotesque being, betwixt
six and seven feet high, was nevertheless an admirable