We will conclude this sketch of _Daft Jock Gray_ with a stupendous anecdote, which we fear, however, is not strictly canonical. Jock once received an affront from his mother, who refused to gratify him with an extra allowance of bannocks, at a time when he meditated a long journey to a New Year’s Day junketing. Whereupon he seems to have felt the yearnings of a hermit and a misanthrope within his breast, and longed to testify to the world how much he both detested and despised it. He withdrew himself from the society of the cottage,—was seen to reject the addresses of his old companion and friend the cat,—and finally, next morning, after tossing an offered cogue of _Scotia’s halesome food_ into the fire, and breaking two of his mother’s best and blackest _cutty pipes_, articles which she held almost in the esteem of _penates_ or household gods,—off he went, and ascended to the top of the highest Eildon Hill, at that time covered with deep snow. There he wreaked out his vengeance in a tremendous and truly astonishing exploit. He rolled a huge snow-ball, till, in its accumulation, it became too large for his strength, and then taking it to the edge of the declivity, “From Eildon’s proud vermilioned brow He dashed upon the plains below”[4] the ponderous mass; which, increasing rapidly in its descent, became a perfect avalanche before it reached the plain, and, when there, seemed like a younger brother of the three Eildons, so that people thought Michael Scott had resumed his old pranks, and added another hill to that which he formerly “split in three.” This enormous conglomeration of snow was found, when it fully melted away through the course of next summer, to have licked up with its mountain tongue thirty-five clumps of withered whin bushes, nineteen hares, three ruined cottages, and a whole encampment of peat-stacks! The _Naturals_, or Idiots, of Scotland, of whom the Davie Gellatley of _fictitious_, and the Daft Jock Gray of _real_ life, may be considered as good specimens, form a class of our countrymen which it is our anxious desire should be kept in remembrance. Many of the anecdotes told of them are extremely laughable, and we are inclined to prize such things, on account of the just exhibitions they sometimes afford of genuine human nature. The sketch we have given, and the anecdotes which we are about to give, may perhaps be considered valuable on this account, and also from their connection, moreover, with the manners of rustic life in the Lowlands of Scotland.