With his charming young wife, Scott settled at Lasswade, about seven miles from Edinburgh. Here he had a lonely and retired cottage, in a most beautiful neighborhood; and was within an easy distance of Edinburgh and his practice there as an advocate. Here he busied himself in his literary pursuits, and made those excursions into Liddesdale, and Ettrick forest, and other parts of the border country, in quest of materials for his Border Minstrelsy, in which he found such exquisite delight. Here he found Shortreed, Hogg, Laidlaw, men all enthusiastic in the same pursuits and tastes. At this time, too, he became acquainted, in Edinburgh, with Leyden, also a border man, full of ballad and poetry, and with powers as gigantic as Scott himself, though uncouth as a colt from the moors. There is nothing in any biography which strikes me so full of the enjoyment of life as Scott's _raids_, as he called them, into Liddesdale, and other border wildernesses, at that period. He found everywhere a new country, untrodden by tourists, unknown to fame, but richly deserving of it. There was a new land discovered, full, from end to end, of wild scenery, and strange, rude, but original character, rich in native wit, humor, and fun. Down Liddesdale there was no road; in it there was no inn. Scott's gig, on the last of seven years' _raids_, was the first wheel-carriage that ever entered it. "The travelers passed from the shepherd's hut to the minister's manse; and again from the cheerful hospitality of the manse, to the rough and jolly welcome of the homestead." "To these rambles," says Lockhart, "Scott owed much of the material of his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and not less of that intimate acquaintance with the living manners of those unsophisticated regions, which constitutes the chief charm of one of the most charming of his prose works." "He was _makin' himsel'_ a' the time," said Mr. Shortreed; "but he did na ken, may be, what he was about till years had passed. At first he thought o' little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun." That overflowing enjoyment of life which so much distinguished Scott at all periods, except the short melancholy one of his decline, now exhibited itself in all its exuberance. "Eh me!" says Mr. Shortreed, "sic an endless fund o' humor and drollery as he then had wi' him! Never ten yards but we were either laughing, or roaring, and singing. Wherever we stopped, how brawlie he suited himsel' to every body! He aye did as the lave did; never made himsel' the great man, or took ony airs in the company." It was in one of these _raids_ that they fell in with the original Dandie Dinmont.