Secondly, note his grandfathers' medical treatment of him; for both his grandfathers were physicians,--Dr. Rutherford, as we have seen, so professed, by whose advice he is sent to Sandy-Knowe. There, his cattle-dealing grandfather, true physician by diploma of Nature, orders him, whenever the day is fine, to be carried out and laid down beside the old shepherd among the crags or rocks around which he fed his sheep. "The impatience of a child soon inclined me to struggle with my infirmity, and I began by degrees to stand, to walk, and to run. Although the limb affected was much shrunk and contracted, my general health, which was of more importance, was much strengthened by being frequently in the open air; and, in a word, I, who in a city had probably been condemned to hopeless and helpless decrepitude, (italics mine,) was now a healthy, high-spirited, and, my lameness apart, a sturdy child,--non sine dîs animosus infans." This, then, is the beginning of Scott's conscious existence,--laid down beside the old shepherd, among the rocks, and among the sheep. "He delighted to roll about in the grass all day long in the midst of the flock, and the sort of fellowship he formed with the sheep and lambs impressed his mind with a degree of affectionate feeling towards them which lasted throughout life." [66] Such cradle, and such companionship, Heaven gives its favourite children. In 1837, two of the then maid-servants of Sandy-Knowe were still living in its neighbourhood; one of them, "Tibby Hunter, remembered the child Scott's coming, well. The young ewe-milkers delighted, she says, to carry him about on their backs among the crags; and he was 'very gleg (quick) at the uptak, and soon kenned every sheep and lamb by head-mark as well as any of them.' His great pleasure, however, was in the society of the 'aged hind' recorded in the epistle to Erskine. 'Auld Sandy Ormistoun,' called, from the most dignified part of his function, 'the cow-bailie,' had the chief superintendence of the flocks that browsed upon 'the velvet tufts of loveliest green.' If the child saw him in the morning, he could not be satisfied unless the old man would set him astride on his shoulder, and take him to keep him company, as he lay watching his charge. "The cow-bailie blew a particular note on his whistle which signified to the maid-servants in the house below when the little boy wished to be carried home again." "Every sheep and lamb by head-mark;"--that is our first lesson; not an easy one, you will find it, if you try the flock of such a farm. Only yesterday (12th July, 1873,) I saw the dairy of one half filled with the 'berry-bread' (large flat-baked cakes enclosing layers of gooseberries) prepared by its mistress for her shearers;--the flock being some six or seven hundred, on Coniston Fells.