Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/100

large and very badly painted landscapes, "in great gilded frames," were given him by one "most amiable and accomplished old lady." She had ordered them from an impoverished amateur whom she desired to befriend, and then palmed them off on Sir Walter, who was too gentle and generous to protest. A more "whimsical subject of affliction" was the presentation of two emus by a Mr. Harmer, a settler in Botany Bay, to whom Scott had given some useful letters of introduction. "I wish his gratitude had either taken a different turn, or remained as quiescent as that of others whom I have obliged more materially," writes Sir Walter in his journal. "I at first accepted the creatures, conceiving them, in my ignorance, to be some sort of blue and green parrots, which, though I do not admire their noise, might scream and yell at their pleasure, if hung up in the hall among the armor. But your emu, it seems, stands six feet high on his stocking soles, and is little better than a kind of cassowary or ostrich. Hang them! They might eat up my collection of old arms, for what I know."