e fragment of biography and autobiography, the
description of the fountainheads from which the genius of the author
flowed. In his early boyhood, John Brown was educated by his father, a
man who, from his son's affectionate description, seems to have confined
a fiery and romantic genius within the channels of Seceder and Burgher
theology. When the father received a call to the "Rose Street Secession
Church," in Edinburgh, the son became a pupil of that ancient Scottish
seminary, the High School--the school where Scott was taught not much
Latin and no Greek worth mentioning. Scott was still alive and strong in
those days, and Dr. Brown describes how he and his school companions
would take off their hats to the Shirra as he passed in the streets.

"Though lame, he was nimble, and all rough and alive with power; had you
met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store farmer,
come of gentle blood--'a stout, blunt carle,' as he says of himself, with
the swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills--a large, sunny,
out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and stooping shoulders was
set that head which, with Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best
known in all the world." Scott was then living in 39 Castle Street. I
do not know whether the many pilgrims, whom one meets moving constantly
in the direction of Melrose and Abbotsford, have thought of making
pilgrimage to Castle Street, and to the grave, there, of Scott's "dear
old friend,"--his dog Camp. Of Dr. Brown's schoolboy days, one knows
little--days when "Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from
the High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only
lovers and boys know how or why." Concerning the doctor's character, he
has left it on record that he liked a dog-fight. "'A dog-fight,' shouted
Bob, and was off, and so was I, both of us all hot, praying that it might
not be over before we were up . . . Dogs like fighting; old Isaac (Watts,
not Walton) says they 'delight' in it, and for the best of all reasons;
and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. This is a
very different thing from a love of making dogs fight." And this was the
most famous of all dog-fights--since the old Irish Brehons settled the
laws of that sport, and gravely decided what was to be done if a child
interfered, or an idiot, or a woman, or a one-eyed man--for this was the
dog-fight in which Rab first was introduced to his