ung Sir Walter, championing
the Auld Town against the New on the slopes of Arthur's Seat. Kipping
was his early sin; but the sportsman's instinct, born of his father's
trade, was so strong within him, that he pinched a fighting cock before
he was breeched, and risked the noose for horse-stealing when marbles
should have engrossed his boyish fancy. Turbulent and lawless, he
bitterly resented the intolerable restraint of a tranquil life, and, at
last, in the hope of a larger liberty, he enlisted for a drummer in the
Norfolk Militia, stationed at the moment in Edinburgh Castle. A brief,
insubordinate year, misspent in his country's service, proved him
hopeless of discipline: he claimed his discharge, and henceforth he was
free to follow the one craft for which nature and his own ambition had
moulded him.

Like Chatterton, like Rimbaud, Haggart came into the full possession of
his talent while still a child. A Barrington of fourteen, he knew every
turn and twist of his craft, before he escaped from school. His youthful
necessities were munificently supplied by facile depredation, and the
only hindrance to immediate riches was his ignorance of flash kens where
he might fence his plunder. Meanwhile he painted his soul black with
wickedness. Such hours as he could snatch from the profitable conduct
of his trade he devoted to the austere debauchery of Leith or the Golden
Acre. Though he knew not the seduction of whisky, he missed never a
dance nor a raffle, joining the frolics of prigs and callets in complete
forgetfulness of the shorter catechism. In vain the kirk compared him to
a 'bottle in the smoke'; in vain the minister whispered of hell and the
gallows; his heart hardened, as his fingers grew agile, and when, at
sixteen, he left his father's house for a sporting life, he had not his
equal in the three kingdoms for cunning and courage.

His first accomplice was Barney M'Guire, who--until a fourteen stretch
sent him to Botany Bay--played Clytus to David's Alexander, and it was
at Portobello Races that their brilliant partnership began. Hitherto
Haggart had worked by stealth; he had tracked his booty under the cloud
of night. Now was the moment to prove his prowess in the eye of day, to
break with a past which he already deemed ignoble. His heart leaped with
the occasion: he tackled his adventure with the hot-head energy of a new
member, big with his maiden speech. The victim was chosen in an instant:
a backer, whose goo