Captain Clutterbuck, the amusing personage who introduces “The Monastery” and “Nigel,” and who employed himself so agreeably during the half-pay part of his life in showing off the ruins of St. Mary’s, finds a happy counterpart in Mr., _vulgo_ Captain O——n, a gentleman well known in Melrose as an amateur cicerone of “_the Abbey_.” His peculiarities and pursuits very nearly resemble those of the fictitious Clutterbuck. He differs from him in this,—that he never was engaged in foreign service, having merely held some rank in a provincial corps of volunteers; but in every other respect he bears a striking resemblance. He is a staid, elderly person, about fifty, dresses like a gentleman,—that is, a Melrose gentleman,—and parades about his native village with a swagger of military gentility in his air, such as the possession of a walking-cane and the title of _Captain_ seems alone capable of inspiring in the legs of mankind. He possesses as much property in the neighbourhood of Melrose as would entitle him to the honourable appellation, _Laird_; but in his case that enviable title is merged in the more romantic and splendid one of _Captain_, of which he is, perhaps, ambitious. He has his property in his own hands, and by its means contrives to keep himself independent. He thus wavers between the species of the half-pay officer and the cock-laird, and has no particular claims upon a distinct classification with either. He is chiefly genteel and idle, and associates a good deal with that regular hanger-on in all country villages, the exciseman. Having by some chance got the title of Captain affixed to his name, (in truth, he was only sergeant of a local militia corps,) he persists in retaining, by abstinence from personal labour, what otherwise he would have forfeited. The dignity which he contrives to maintain in his native town is scarcely wonderful, when we consider how few are ever independent in such a community, and to what a degree the respect of the illiterate is calculated to be excited by the possession of a very little knowledge,—such as Captain O. would easily acquire in the course of his unoccupied life, and which the opportunities of ease did not fail to confer upon even David Ritchie. Besides, to speak in the deferential words of Captain Clutterbuck’s Kennaquhair Club, “The Captain has something in him after a’—few folk ken sae mickle about the Abbey.” O.’s knowledge upon this point is indeed well calculated to excite the astonishment and veneration of the natives. He has not only driven the grave-digger fairly off the field, who, in the reality of Melrose, as well as in the ideality of Kennaquhair, was the former cicerone of the ruins,—but he is even a formidable rival to the ingenious John Bower himself. Old David Kyle, who kept the head inn at Melrose, and who is the _David_ of the Introduction here illustrated, was in the frequent practice of calling upon Captain O. for the purpose there so humorously described, namely, to press