A little later he had another chance, being sent north to visit another of his father's clients, an old Jacobite who had fought in the uprisings of 1715 and 1745. Paul Jones was then threatening a descent on the Scotch coast, and Walter had the satisfaction of seeing the old Jacobite chief making ready to bear arms again, and heard him exult at the prospect of drawing claymore once more before he died. The boy was so delighted at the stories the old man told that the latter invited him to visit him that fall, and so he spent his holiday with him. Riding northward on this visit the vale of Perth first burst on his view. Long afterward he described the tremendous impression this sight made upon him. "I recollect pulling up the reins," he wrote later, "without meaning to do so, and gazing on the scene before me as if I had been afraid it would shift, like those in a theatre, before I could distinctly observe its different parts, or convince myself that what I saw was real." Even as he remembered so vividly the tales the old men and women had told him when he was a very little boy, the stories of his grandmother, of border warfare, of heroes of Scotland, such as Watt of Harden, and Wight Willie of Aikwood, merrymen much like Robin Hood and Little John, and as he remembered the romances he and his friend had read in the hills, so he was now treasuring up wild bits of scenery with all the ardor of a poet or a painter. He was growing to know Scotland as no other man had ever known it. The boy Walter had little knowledge then of the great use to which he was later to put his love of Scottish history; he expected to be a lawyer and was studying to that end, but all his spare moments were spent in hunting legends of his land. He became eager to visit the then wild and inaccessible region of Liddesdale, so that he might see the ruins of the famous castle of the Hermitage, and try to pick up some of the ancient "riding ballads" as they were called, songs which were said to be still preserved among the descendants of the old moss-troopers, who had followed the banners of the House of Douglass, when they were lords of that remote castle. He found a man who knew that rugged country well, and for seven successive years Walter Scott made a "raid," as he called it, into that country, following each stream to its source, and studying every ruined tower or castle from foundation stone to topmost battlement.