ttage and the brook,
pointing the edge of his woodman's axe, and listening to Tom
Purdie's lecture touching the plantation that most needed thinning.
After breakfast he would take possession of a dressing-room
upstairs, and write a chapter of _The Pirate_; and then, having
made up and despatched his packet for Mr. Ballantyne, away to join
Purdie wherever the foresters were at work ... until it was time to
rejoin his own party at Abbotsford or the quiet circle of the
cottage. When his guests were few and friendly, he often made them
come over and meet him at Chiefswood in a body towards evening....
He was ready with all sorts of devices to supply the wants of a
narrow establishment; he used to delight particularly in sinking
the wine in a well under the _brae_ ere he went out, and hauling up
the basket just before dinner was announced,--this primitive device
being, he said, what he had always practised when a young
housekeeper, and in his opinion far superior in its results to any
application of ice; and in the same spirit, whenever the weather
was sufficiently genial, he voted for dining out of doors
altogether."

Few events of importance except the successive appearances of "our
buiks" as Tom Purdie called his master's novels, and an occasional visit
to London or the continent, intervened to break the busy monotony of
this Abbotsford life. On one of these visits to London, Scott was
invited to dine with the Prince Regent, and when the prince became King
George IV, in 1820, almost the first act of his reign was to create
Scott a baronet. Scott accepted the honor gratefully, as coming, he
said, "from the original source of all honor." There can well be two
opinions as to whether this least admirable of English kings constituted
a very prime fountain of honor, judged by democratic standards; but to
Scott's mind, such an imputation would have been next to sacrilege. The
feudal bias of his mind, strong to start with, had been strengthened by
his long sojourn among the visions of a feudal past; the ideals of
feudalism were living realities to him; and he accepted knighthood from
his king's hand in exactly the same spirit which determined his attitude
of humility towards his "chief," the Duke of Buccleugh, and which
impelled him to exhaust his genius in the effort to build up a great
family estate.

There were already signs that the en