These days of holiday flew, however, as holidays will fly. Cameron’s Highland patron had Cosmo introduced to him, and consented that his son should travel in the company of the son of “Mrs. Livingstone, of Norlaw,” and the lad went home, full of plans for his journey, to which the Mistress as yet had given only a very vague and general consent, and of which she scarcely still understood the necessity. When Cosmo came home, he had the mid-chamber allotted to him as a study, and went to work with devotion. The difficulty was rather how to choose between the narrative in ballad verse, the spirited dramatic sketch, and the historical tale, than how to execute them, for Cosmo had that facility of language, and even of idea, which many very youthful people, with a “literary turn,” (they were very much less common in those days) often possess, to the half-amusement, half-admiration of their seniors and their own intense confusion in maturer days. Literature was not then what it is now, the common resource of most well-educated young men, who do not know what else to do with themselves. It was still a rare glory in that rural district where the mantle of Sir Walter lay only over the great novelist’s grave, and had descended upon nobody’s shoulders; and as Cosmo went on with his venture, the Mistress, glowing with mother-pride and ambition, hearing the little bits of the “sketch"--eighteen is always dramatical--which seemed, to her loving ears, melodious, and noble, and life-like, almost above comparison, became perfectly willing to consent to any thing which was likely to perfect this gift of magic. “Though I canna weel see what better they could have,” she said to herself, as she went down from Cosmo’s study, wiping her eyes. Cosmo’s muse had sprung, fully equipped, like Minerva, into a glorious existence--at least, so his mother, and so, too, if he had permitted himself to know his own sentiments--perhaps also Cosmo thought.