It was a curious trait in the character of David Ritchie, that he was very superstitious. Not only had he planted his house, his garden, and even his intended grave, all round with the mountain-ash, but it is also well authenticated that he never went abroad without a branch of this singular antidote, tied round with a _red thread_, in his pocket, to prevent the effects of the _evil eye_. When the _sancta sanctorum_ of his domicile were so sacrilegiously ransacked after his death, there was found an elf-stone, or small round pebble, bored in the centre, hung by a cord of hair passed through the hole to the head of his bed! After taking the foregoing view of the Wizard’s fairy bower, I was next conducted to his grave, which lies in the immediate vicinity. A slip of his favourite rowan-tree marked the spot. It had been planted several years after his death by some kindly hand, and, in the absence of a less perishable monument, seemed a wonderful act of delicacy and attention. It spoke a pathos to the feelings that the finest inscription could not have excited,—it was so consonant with the former desires of “the poor inhabitant below!” In allusion to the foregoing circumstances, the following verses were composed, and inserted in a periodical publication:— I sat upon the Wizard’s grave,— ’Twas on a smiling summer day, When all around the desert spot Bloomed in the young delights of May. In undistinguished lowliness I found the little mound of earth, And bitter weeds o’ergrew the place, As if his heart had given them birth, And they from thence their nurture drew,— In such luxuriancy they grew. No friendship to his grave had lent Such rudely-sculptured monument As marked the peasant’s place of rest; For he, the latest of his race, Had left behind no friend to trace Such frail memorial o’er his breast. But o’er his head a sapling waved The honours of its slender form, And in its loneliness had braved The autumn’s blast—the winter’s storm. Some friendly hand the tribute gave, To mark the undistinguished grave, That, drooping o’er that sod, it might Repay a world’s neglectful scorn, And, catching sorrow from the night, There weep a thousand tears at morn. It was an emblem of himself— A widowed, solitary thing, To which no circling season might An hour of greener gladness bring; A churchyard desert was its doom, Its parent soil a darkling tomb; Such was the Solitary’s fate, So joyless and so desolate; For, blasted soon as it was given, His was the life that knew no hope, His was the soul that knew no heaven— Then, stranger, by one pitying drop, Forgive, forgive the Misanthrope! FOOTNOTES: