A letter from my dear friend Dr. John Brown,[8] corrects (to my great delight) a mistake about George’s Square I made in my last letter. It is not in the New Town, but in what was then a meadow district, sloping to the south from old Edinburgh; and the air of it would be almost as healthy for the child as that of the open country. But the change to George’s Square, though it checked the illness, did not restore the use of the limb; the boy wanted exercise as well as air, and Dr. Rutherford sent him to his other grandfather’s farm.
II. 1774—1775. The first year at Sandy-Knowe. In this year, note first his new nurse. The child had a maid sent with him to prevent his being an inconvenience to the family. This maid had left her heart behind her in Edinburgh (ill trusted),[9] and went mad in the solitude;—“tempted by the devil,” she told Alison Wilson, the housekeeper, “to kill the child and bury it in the moss.”
“Alison instantly took possession of my person,” says Scott. And there is no more said of Alison in the autobiography.
But what the old farm-housekeeper must have been to the child, is told in the most finished piece of all the beautiful story of ‘Old Mortality.’ Among his many beautifully invented names, here is one not invented—very dear to him.
“ ‘I wish to speak an instant with one Alison Wilson, who resides here,’ said Henry.
“ ‘She’s no at hame the day,’ answered Mrs. Wilson in propriâ personâ—the state of whose headdress perhaps inspired her with this direct mode of denying herself—‘and ye are but a mislear’d person to speer for her in sic a manner. Ye might have had an M under your belt for Mistress Wilson of Milnwood.’ ” Read on, if you forget it, to the end, that third chapter of the last volume of ‘Old Mortality.’ The story of such return to the home of childhood has been told often; but never, so far as I have knowledge, so exquisitely. I do not doubt that Elphin’s name is from Sandy-Knowe also; but cannot trace it.
Secondly, note his grandfathers’ medical treatment of him; for both his grandfathers were physicians,—Dr. Rutherford, as we have seen, so professed, by whose advice he is sent to Sandy-Knowe. There, his cattle-dealing grandfather, true physician by diploma of Nature, orders him, whenever the day is fine, to be carried out and laid down beside the old shepherd among the crags or rocks around which he fed his sheep. “The impatience of a child soon inclined me to struggle with my infirmity, and I began by degrees to stand, to walk, and to run. Although the limb affected was much shrunk and contracted, my general health, which was of more importance, was much strengthened by being frequently in the open air; and, in a word, I, who in a city had probably been condemned to hopeless and helpless decrepitude, (italics mine,) was now a healthy, high-spirited, and, my lameness apart, a sturdy child,—non sine dîs animosus infans.”
This, then, is the beginning of Scott’s conscious existence,—laid down beside the old shepherd, among the rocks, and among the sheep. “He delighted to roll about in the grass all day long in the midst of the flock, and the sort of fellowship he formed with the sheep and lambs impressed his mind with a degree of affectionate feeling towards them which lasted throughout life.”[10]
Such cradle, and such companionship, Heaven gives its favourite children.
In 1837, two of the then maid-servants of Sandy-Knowe were still living in its neighbourhood; one of them, “Tibby Hunter, remembered the child Scott’s coming, well. The young ewe-milkers delighted, she says, to carry him about on their backs among the crags; and he was ‘very gleg (quick) at the uptak, and soon kenned every sheep and lamb by head-mark as well as any of them.’ His great pleasure, however, was in the society of the ‘aged hind’ recorded in the epistle to Erskine. ‘Auld Sandy Ormistoun,’ called, from the most dignified part of his function, ‘the cow-bailie,’ had the chief superintendence of the flocks that browsed upon ‘the velvet tufts of loveliest green.’ If the child saw him in the morning, he could not be satisfied unless the old man would set him astride on his shoulder, and take him to keep him company, as he lay watching his charge.