e thought as good a judge
of a horse as --; to have the knowing cut of --'s jacket. These were thy
gods, O Israel!

Now I was a mere looker-on; seldom an unmoved, and sometimes an angry
spectator, but still a spectator only, of the pursuits of mankind.
I felt how little my opinion was valued by those engaged in the busy
turmoil, yet I exercised it with the profusion of an old lawyer retired
from his profession, who thrusts himself into his neighbour's affairs,
and gives advice where it is not wanted, merely under pretence of loving
the crack of the whip.

I came amid these reflections to the brow of a hill, from which I
expected to see Glentanner, a modest-looking yet comfortable house, its
walls covered with the most productive fruit-trees in that part of the
country, and screened from the most stormy quarters of the horizon by a
deep and ancient wood, which overhung the neighbouring hill. The house
was gone; a great part of the wood was felled; and instead of the
gentlemanlike mansion, shrouded and embosomed among its old hereditary
trees, stood Castle Treddles, a huge lumping four-square pile of
freestone, as bare as my nail, except for a paltry edging of decayed and
lingering exotics, with an impoverished lawn stretched before it, which,
instead of boasting deep green tapestry, enamelled with daisies and with
crowsfoot and cowslips, showed an extent of nakedness, raked, indeed,
and levelled, but where the sown grasses had failed with drought, and
the earth, retaining its natural complexion, seemed nearly as brown and
bare as when it was newly dug up.

The house was a large fabric, which pretended to its name of Castle only
from the front windows being finished in acute Gothic arches (being,
by the way, the very reverse of the castellated style), and each angle
graced with a turret about the size of a pepper-box. In every other
respect it resembled a large town-house, which, like a fat burgess, had
taken a walk to the country on a holiday, and climbed to the top of all
eminence to look around it. The bright red colour of the freestone, the
size of the building, the formality of its shape, and awkwardness of its
position, harmonized as ill with the sweeping Clyde in front, and the
bubbling brook which danced down on the right, as the fat civic form,
with bushy wig, gold-headed cane, maroon-coloured coat, and mottled silk
stockings, would have accorded with the wild and magnificent scenery of
Corehouse Linn.

I we