sympathy, poor Raeburn was only laughed at, for it was well known that he was worth thousands.
Not many years before his death the Hermit was arrested for threatening to shoot a workman who was trimming a hedge which Raeburn asserted was altogether on his property, but which the other party asserted was on the boundary line, and therefore he had a right to trim one side of it. The matter came to court and after much litigation, during which the hermit expected to be successful, the case was at last decided against him. He actually fainted in court, or at any rate ‘shammed Abraham’, but it was ‘no go; ‘no one sympathised with him, and he was ’eft to brood more and more on his misfortunes, and these came not singly upon the poor fellow. In 1842 a gang of robbers broke into his house by the window, and holding loaded pistols to his breast, threatened to murder him if he did not surrender up all his money; after searching every corner, ‘the villains went off with about £.30 in gold, silver, and copper, and had the audacity as they went away to fire their pistols in the air by way of defiance. One scoundrel, Duffy, was transported 10 years for this, and his wife imprisoned for 6 months. The law was surely very remiss here; we have seen men again and again hanged in Glasgow for crimes not one-tenth so had as Raeburn’s case; and yet for all this some of his biographers seem to chuckle over the unfortunate man’s misfortunes as a piece of merriment. The poor fellow seemed to feel gratefully when any of his visitors sympathised with him in his mishaps; and is there anything to be amazed at in this? Human nature, to a certain degree, operates in like manner in every breast, and he who has no sympathy for misfortune unmerited, is unworthy the name of man.
The hermit several times entertained the notion of paying her Majesty, Queen Victoria, a visit, and laying his complaints before her when he had no doubt they would be redressed. “She was a good little woman,” he said, “a very good woman, and would get back his
