d, 'The
blessing of our Master be with you, young man! My hours are like the ears
of the latter harvest, and your days are yet in the spring; and yet you
may be gathered into the garner of mortality before me, for the sickle of
death cuts down the green as oft as the ripe, and there is a colour in
your cheek, that, like the bud of the rose, serveth oft to hide the worm
of corruption. Wherefore labour as one who knoweth not when his master
calleth. And if it be my lot to return to this village after ye are gane
hame to your ain place, these auld withered hands will frame a stane of
memorial, that your name may not perish from among the people.'

"I thanked Old Mortality for his kind intentions in my behalf, and heaved
a sigh, not, I think, of regret so much as of resignation, to think of
the chance that I might soon require his good offices. But though, in all
human probability, he did not err in supposing that my span of life may
be abridged in youth, he had over-estimated the period of his own
pilgrimage on earth. It is now some years since he has been missed in all
his usual haunts, while moss, lichen, and deer-hair, are fast covering
those stones, to cleanse which had been the business of his life. About
the beginning of this century he closed his mortal toils, being found on
the highway near Lockerby, in Dumfries-shire, exhausted and just
expiring. The old white pony, the companion of all his wanderings, was
standing by the side of his dying master. There was found about his
person a sum of money sufficient for his decent interment, which serves
to show that his death was in no ways hastened by violence or by want.
The common people still regard his memory with great respect; and many
are of opinion, that the stones which he repaired will not again require
the assistance of the chisel. They even assert, that on the tombs where
the manner of the martyrs' murder is recorded, their names have remained
indelibly legible since the death of Old Mortality, while those of the
persecutors, sculptured on the same monuments, have been entirely
defaced. It is hardly necessary to say that this is a fond imagination,
and that, since the time of the pious pilgrim, the monuments which were
the objects of his care are hastening, like all earthly memorials, into
ruin or decay.

"My readers will of course understand, that in embodying into one
compressed narrative many of the anecdotes which I had the advantage of
deriving from Old M