thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of
its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent
and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this volume of
Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener, may stand
alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John and Robert
drew very close together in their lives; for John was rough--he smelt of
the windy brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the
hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the
two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the old Adam that pleases
men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he was a wayfarer besides,
and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may be, and however Robert's
profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that follows, he was a man
of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, if it were possible to
recast a piece of work so old, I should like well to draw again with a
maturer touch. And as I think of him and of John, I wonder in what other
country two such men would be found dwelling together, in a hamlet of
some twenty cottages, in the woody fold of a green hill.

V

AN OLD SCOTS GARDENER

I think I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in the
uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the south-western hills there
may yet linger a decrepit representative of this bygone good fellowship;
but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met one man in my life
who might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew
Fairservice,--though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence
could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern
flower-plots. There was a dignity about his tall, stooping form, and an
earnestness in his wrinkled face, that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don
Quixote who had come through the training of the Covenant, and been
nourished in his youth on "Walker's Lives" and "The Hind let Loose."

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this
as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the
infirmities of my description. To me, who find it so difficult to tell
the little that I know, he stands essentially as a _genius loci_. It is
impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden
in the lap of the hill, with its