"His greatest pleasure was to retire to his house in the country, where he had a garden stored with all the herbs and trees which the climate would bear; here he used to enjoy his hours unmolested, and prosecute his studies without interruption." [63] The school of medicine in Edinburgh owed its rise to this man, and it was by his pupil Dr. Rutherford's advice, as we saw, that the infant Walter's life was saved. His mother could not nurse him, and his first nurse had consumption. To this, and the close air of the wynd, must be attributed the strength of the childish fever which took away the use of the right limb when he was eighteen months old. How many of your own children die, think you, or are wasted with sickness, from the same causes, in our increasing cities? Scott's lameness, however, we shall find, was, in the end, like every other condition of his appointed existence, helpful to him. A letter from my dear friend Dr. John Brown, [64] corrects (to my great delight) a mistake about George's Square I made in my last letter. It is not in the New Town, but in what was then a meadow district, sloping to the south from old Edinburgh; and the air of it would be almost as healthy for the child as that of the open country. But the change to George's Square, though it checked the illness, did not restore the use of the limb; the boy wanted exercise as well as air, and Dr. Rutherford sent him to his other grandfather's farm. II. 1774--1775. The first year at Sandy-Knowe. In this year, note first his new nurse. The child had a maid sent with him to prevent his being an inconvenience to the family. This maid had left her heart behind her in Edinburgh (ill trusted), [65] and went mad in the solitude;--"tempted by the devil," she told Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, "to kill the child and bury it in the moss." "Alison instantly took possession of my person," says Scott. And there is no more said of Alison in the autobiography. But what the old farm-housekeeper must have been to the child, is told in the most finished piece of all the beautiful story of 'Old Mortality.' Among his many beautifully invented names, here is one not invented--very dear to him. "'I wish to speak an instant with one Alison Wilson, who resides here,' said Henry. "'She's no at hame the day,' answered Mrs. Wilson in propriâ personâ--the state of whose headdress perhaps inspired her with this direct mode of denying herself--'and ye are but a mislear'd person to speer for her in sic a manner. Ye might have had an M under your belt for Mistress Wilson of Milnwood.'" Read on, if you forget it, to the end, that third chapter of the last volume of 'Old Mortality.' The story of such return to the home of childhood has been told often; but never, so far as I have knowledge, so exquisitely. I do not doubt that Elphin's name is from Sandy-Knowe also; but cannot trace it.