tells us that on one occasion he transcribed no less than a hundred and twenty folio pages at a sitting.
In the midst of these mechanical duties, he did not lose sight of the favourite objects of his study and meditation. He made frequent excursions into the Lowland as well as Highland districts in search of traditionary relics. These pilgrimages he frequently performed on foot. His constitution, now become hardy by severe training, made him careless of exposure, and his frank and warm-hearted manners—eminently favourable to his purposes, by thawing at once any feelings of frosty reserve which might have encountered a stranger—made him equally welcome at the staid and decorous manse, and at the rough but hospitable board of the peasant. Here was, indeed, the study of the future novelist; the very school in which to meditate those models of character and situation which he was afterward, long afterward, to transfer, in such living colours, to the canvass. "He was makin' himsell a' the time," says one of his companions, "but he didna ken, maybe, what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought o' little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun." The honest writer to the signet does not seem to have thought it either so funny or so profitable; for on his son's return from one of these raids, as he styled them, the old gentleman peevishly inquired how he had been living so long. "Pretty much like the young ravens," answered Walter; "I only wished I had been as good a player on the flute as poor George Primrose
