ltogether employed in
amusements, for I have got two or three clients besides my uncle,
and am busy drawing tacks and contracts,--not, however, of
marriage. I am in a fair way of making money, if I stay here
long.

Here I have written a pretty long letter, and nothing in it; but
you know writing to one's friends is the next thing to seeing
them. My love to my father and the boys, from, Dear Mother, your
dutiful and affectionate son,

WALTER SCOTT.

[Footnote 74: The present Laird of Raeburn.]

It {p.138} appears from James Ballantyne's _memoranda_, that having
been very early bound apprentice to a solicitor in Kelso, he had no
intercourse with Scott during the three or four years that followed
their companionship at the school of Lancelot Whale; but Ballantyne
was now sent to spend a winter in Edinburgh, for the completion of his
professional education, and in the course of his attendance on the
Scots Law class, became a member of a young Teviotdale club, where
Walter Scott seldom failed to make his appearance. They supped
together, it seems, once a month; and here, as in the associations
above mentioned, good fellowship was often pushed beyond the limits of
modern indulgence. The strict intimacy between Scott and Ballantyne
was not at this time renewed,--their avocations prevented it,--but the
latter was no uninterested observer of his old comrade's bearing on
this new scene. "Upon all these occasions," he says, "one of the
principal features of his character was displayed as conspicuously as
I believe it ever was at any later period. This was the remarkable
ascendency he never failed to exhibit among his young companions, and
which appeared to arise from their involuntary and unconscious
submission to the same firmness of understanding, and gentle exercise
of it, which produced the same effects throughout his after-life.
Where there was always a good deal of drinking, there was of course
now and then a good deal of quarrelling. But three words from Walter
Scott never failed to put all such propensities to quietness."

Mr. Ballantyne's account of his friend's peace-making exertions at
this club may seem a little at variance with some preceding details.
There is a difference, however, between encouraging quarrels in the
bosom of a convivial party, and taking a fair part in a _row_ between
one's own party and another. But Balla