MARJORIE FLEMING. A SKETCH. BEING THE PAPER ENTITLED “_PET MARJORIE: A STORY OF CHILD-LIFE FIFTY YEARS AGO_.” BY JOHN BROWN, M. D., AUTHOR OF “RAB AND HIS FRIENDS.” BOSTON: TICKNOR AND FIELDS. 1864. NOTE. THE separate publication of this sketch has been forced upon me by the “somewhat free use” made of it in a second and thereby enlarged edition of the “little book” to which I owe my _introduction_ to Marjorie Fleming,--but nothing more; a “use” so exceedingly “free” as to extend almost to everything with which I had ventured perhaps to encumber the letters and journals of that dear child. To be called “kind and genial” by the individual who devised this edition has, strange as he may think it, altogether failed to console me. Empty praise without the solid pudding is proverbially a thing of naught; but what shall we say of praise the emptiness of which is aggravated, not merely by the absence, but by the actual abstraction, of the pudding? This little act of conveyancing--this “engaging compilation,” as he would have called it--puts me in mind of that pleasant joke in the preface to “Essays by Mr. Goldsmith”: “I would desire in this case, to imitate that fat man whom I have somewhere heard of in a shipwreck, who when the sailors, prest by famine, were taking slices from his body, to satisfy their hunger, insisted with great justice on having the first cut for himself.” I have to thank the proprietors of the _North British Review_ for permitting this reprint. J. B. _To_ MISS FLEMING, TO WHOM I AM INDEBTED FOR ALL ITS MATERIALS, _THIS MEMORIAL_ OF HER DEAR AND UNFORGOTTEN MAIDIE IS GRATEFULLY INSCRIBED. MARJORIE FLEMING. ONE November afternoon in 1810,--the year in which _Waverley_ was resumed and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last two volumes in three weeks, and made immortal in 1814, and when its author, by the death of Lord Melville, narrowly escaped getting a civil appointment in India,--three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like school-boys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet. The three friends sought the _bield_ of the low wall old Edinburgh boys remember well, and sometimes miss now, as they struggle with the stout west wind.