times was intimate with all of the so-called lower classes.
Tinkers, cairds, poachers, were his familiar roadside acquaintances, and
he extracted great amusement from their peculiarities. Sometimes he had
to win the respect of these worthies by knocking them down in the
beginning of the acquaintance, but after that they usually stood by him
to the end. He usually figured as the champion of the weak in these
games at fisticuffs, but sometimes he managed things on his own account.

Although he loved to wander in the Highlands, he made his home among the
lakes at Elleray. This home was a rambling, mossy-roofed cottage, of
very picturesque appearance, overhung by a giant sycamore.

"Never," he says, "in this well-wooded world, not even in the days
of the Druids, could there have been such another tree. It would be
easier to suppose two Shakspeares. Oh, sweetest and shadiest of
sycamores, we love thee beyond all other trees."

And he thus discourses of the lakes amid which he lived,--and about
whose borders he wandered so continually:--

"Each lake hath its promontories, that every step you walk, every
stroke you row, undergo miraculous metamorphoses, accordant to the
change that comes o'er the spirit of your dream, as your
imagination glances again over the transfigured mountains. Each
lake hath its bays of bliss, where might ride at her moorings, made
of the stalks of water-lilies, the fairy bark of a spiritual life.
Each lake hath its hanging terraces of immortal green, that along
her shores run glimmering far down beneath the superficial
sunshine, where the poet in his becalmed canoe, among the lustre,
could fondly swear by all that is most beautiful on earth, and air,
and water, that these three are one, blended as they are by the
interfusing spirit of heavenly peace."

Lover of beauty as he was, yet he was well content with what he could
find in Scotland; he cared little for England, and nothing for the
Continent. There was enough to exhaust the seeing possibilities of a
lifetime in his own little land, with its rocks and lakes and heathery
hills. This was because he really had the poet's eye and heart. Such do
not need to traverse the whole wide world to find enough of beauty; it
is only the mediocre and the commonplace who care to gaze superficially
at the landscapes of two continents. But Wilson knew his land not only
with the eye of