letter now before us, 'and ever did since I burnt my _Rudiments_.' More congenial amusement he found in the exercise of his story-telling faculty. When the master's back was turned, the _Sennachie_, as the master called him, would gather round him the other boys and narrate to them the adventures of his uncle, the story of Gulliver, and the shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe, or even the mysteries of Mrs. Radcliffe. When the sixty volumes of his father and the hundred and sixty of his uncles had been consumed, he fell in with a collection of essayists from Addison to Henry Mackenzie, the influence of which, along with Goldsmith's _Citizen of the World_, remained to the last as a powerful impress upon his prose style. But he was rapidly finding his national and true school. The Hill of Cromarty, part of De Beaumont's Ben-Nevis system, and the rich Liassic deposit of Eathie, were his favourite haunts, and his uncle Alexander, after his own work was done, would spend with him many an hour in the ebb tide. To the training thus acquired from this untaught naturalist he owed much of his own close powers of observation, which led, however, well-nigh to a fatal termination through an adventurous visit to the Doo-cot caves, from which he was rescued late at night during a high tide. This formed the subject of his first copy of juvenile verse, which was recited 'with vast applause' by the handsomest girl at the Cromarty boarding establishment kept by Miss Elizabeth Bond. In her own early days she had known the father and mother of Scott; and, when in 1814 she had published her _Letters of a Village Governess_, she had dedicated them to the great novelist, who later on in the midst of his own troubles, living in lodgings away from Abbotsford, could yet remember to send her ten pounds 'to scare the wolf from the door,' as he cheerily remarked, when she had found the truth of her own saying that it was hard for a single woman to get through the world 'without a head'--unmarried. His reading at this time received a curious extension through there falling into his hands a copy of _Military Medley_ belonging to a retired officer, and on the shore he would carry out plans of fortification as therein set forth by the great French engineer Vauban. With sand for towers, and variegated shells and limpets for soldiers, he worked his way through the evolutions of troops, and no reader of Scott will fail to remember the similar action by Sir Walter which, in the introduction to the third canto of _Marmion_, he describes as taking place at Sandy Knowe, in the air of the Cheviots, near the old tower of Smailholme that 'charmed his fancy's waking hour':-- 'Again I fought each combat o'er, Pebbles and shells in order laid The mimic ranks of war displayed.'