Through the medium of my guide, a sagacious country lad, I contrived to ask her a number of questions concerning her brother; but she was extremely shy in answering them, and expressed her jealousy of my intentions by saying, “she wondered why so many grand people had come from distant parts to inquire after her family—she was sure there was naething _ill_ anent them.” Little did she, poor soul, understand the cause of this curiosity, or the honour conferred upon her family by the attention of the great _hermit-author_, in whose works the very mention of a name confers immortality. She showed us her brother’s Bible. It was of Kincaid’s fine quarto edition, and had been bought in 1773 by the Dwarf himself. His name was written with his own hand on a blank leaf, and it was with something like transport that I drew a fac-simile of the autograph into my pocket-book, which I still preserve. Agnes Ritchie died in December, 1821, ten years after the decease of her brother, and was buried in the same grave, in Manor churchyard, on which occasion the deformed bones of Bowed Davie were found, to the utter disproof of a vulgar report, that they had suffered resurrection at the hands of certain anatomists in the College of Glasgow. I found the part of the house which had been inhabited by the Dwarf himself deserted as he had left it at his death. Its furniture had been all dispersed among the curious or the friendly; and a host of poultry were now suffered to roost on the rafters where only soot formerly dared to hang. His seat of divination before the door had been suffered to remain. It was covered very rurally with a ruinous _door of a cart_. There seemed no precise window in the hut, but it contained numerous holes and bores all round, some of which were built up with turf. I drew a pair of rusty nails from a joist near the door, and, wrapping them up in a piece of paper, brought them away. We stole a look at the garden, by climbing up the high wall. Some care has been taken by the neighbouring peasants to preserve it in good order; but, alas! it is scarcely the ghost of what it was: “Cum Troja fuit,” there was not a weed to be seen over its whole surface, nor durst a single _kail-worm_ intrude its unhallowed nose within the precincts; an hundred mountain-ashes, displaying their red, sour fruit to the temptation of the passing urchin, stood around like a guard, to preserve from the influence of witchcraft the richer treasures that lay within,— “Fair as the gardens of _Gul_ in their bloom”; but now weeds and kail-worms were abundant, the rowan-trees had been all cut down, and Bowed Davie’s garden, that once might have rivalled Milton’s imagination of Paradise, now lay stale, flat, and unprofitable—like a buxom cheek deprived of its blushes, or Greece deserted by the liberty that once, according to Byron, _inspired_ its beauty. A few _skeps_, however, still remained, which the neighbouring Hobbie Elliots had _not_ taken away.