ate with Mr. Ferguson," I said.

"Oh, intimate with Bob!" he rejoined; "we were hand and glove, man. I
have sat with him in Lucky Middlemass's, almost every evening, for two
years; and I have given him hints for some of the best things in his
book. 'Twas I who tumbled down the cage in the Meadows, and began
breaking the lamps.

'Ye who oft finish care in Lethe's cup,
Who love to swear and roar, and _keep it up_,
List to a brother's voice, whose sole delight
Is sleep all day, and riot all the night.'

There's spirit for you! But Bob was never sound at bottom; and I have
told him so. 'Bob,' I have said, 'Bob, you're but a hypocrite after all,
man--without half the spunk you pretend to. Why don't you take a pattern
by me, who fear nothing, and believe only the agreeable? But, poor
fellow, he had weak nerves, and a church-going propensity that did him
no good; and you see the effects. 'Twas all nonsense, Tom, of his
throwing the squib into the Glassite meeting-house. Between you and I,
that was a cut far beyond him in his best days, poet as he was. 'Twas I
who did it, man, and never was there a cleaner row in auld Reekie."

"Heartless, contemptible puppy!" said my comrade, the sailor, as we left
the room. "Your poor friend must be ill, indeed, if he be but half as
insane as his quondam companion. But he cannot: there is no madness like
that of the heart. What could have induced a man of genius to associate
with a thing so thoroughly despicable?"

"The same misery, Miller," I said, "that brings a man _acquainted with
strange bedfellows_."

CHAPTER VIII.

"O thou, my elder brother in misfortune,
By far my elder brother in the muses,
With tears I pity thy unhappy fate!"--BURNS.

The asylum in which my unfortunate friend was confined, at this time the
only one in Edinburgh, was situated in an angle of the city wall. It was
a dismal-looking mansion, shut in on every side, by the neighbouring
houses, from the view of the surrounding country; and so effectually
covered up from the nearer street, by a large building in front, that it
seemed possible enough to pass a lifetime in Edinburgh without coming to
the knowledge of its existence. I shuddered as I looked up to its
blackened walls, thinly sprinkled with miserable-looking windows, barred
with iron, and thought of it as a sort of burial-place of dead minds.
But it was a Golgotha, which, with more than the horrors of the grave,
had nei