There were no inns in the whole district. The explorers had to stop over night at any chance shepherd's hut or farmer's cottage, but everywhere they met with open welcome, and from each home they gathered songs and stories, and sometimes relics of border wars to take back with them to Edinburgh. Even then the youth had little notion of what he should do with all the facts he was gathering. The friend he traveled with said later, "Walter was makin' himself a' the time, but he didna ken maybe what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought o' little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun." * * * * * In course of time Scott was called to the bar as a lawyer, and took his place with the dozens of young men who hung about the Parliament House in Edinburgh waiting for briefs of cases to be argued. There were lots of debating clubs in the Scotch capital at that time, and Scott was a member of several. Some time was spent in argument, but more in telling stories and in singing songs. Here the young lawyer ruled supreme. No other man could tell such tales as he, and none knew so many and such curious songs. The stories were not all his own; frequently he retold old ones that he had heard, dressing them up to suit his taste. Once a friend complained that he had changed a story told him the day before. "Why," said Scott, with twinkling eyes, "I don't change stories. I only put a cocked hat on their heads, and stick a cane into their hands--to make them fit for going into company." Fifteen years passed and all England was reading eagerly the wonderful historical poems and romances written by a man who called himself the "Wizard of the North." Scotland had always been a desolate barren country in the eyes of the rest of the world, its history unknown, its people cold and uninviting. Suddenly all that was changed: Scotland sprang into being as a land of romance, filled with poetry, a country full of glorious scenery, a people descended from a line of kings. Even the narrow streets of Edinburgh and the old Canongate itself became historic ground under the Wizard's spell. The Wizard was Walter Scott, and now he found the whole world as eager to hear the stories and poems he had to tell about his country as his boy friends had been years before. He had not changed much as he grew up. At the height of his fame Walter Scott was still in spirit the eager boy of the old city, finding romance everywhere about him because he looked for it with the eyes of youth. XVI James Fenimore Cooper The Boy of Otsego Hall: 1789-1851