“Hearing that you are the C. L. N. who have favored the North British Courant from time to time with poetical effusions which seem to show a good deal of talent, I write to ask whether you have ever done any thing in the way of prose romance, or essays of a humorous character in the style of Sterne, or narrative poetry. I am just about to start (with a good staff of well-known contributors) a new monthly, to be called the Auld Reekie Magazine, a miscellany of general literature; and should be glad to receive and give my best consideration to any articles from your pen. The rates of remuneration I can scarcely speak decisively about until the success of this new undertaking is in some degree established; but this I may say—that they shall be liberal and satisfactory, and I trust may be the means of inaugurating a new and better system of mutual support between publishers and authors—the accomplishment of which has long been a great object of my life.
“Your obedient servant,
“Peter Todhunter.”
“The North British Courant! poetry! writing for a magazine!—what does it a’ mean?” cried the Mistress. “Do you mean to tell me you’re an author, Cosmo Livingstone?—and me never kent—a bairn like you!”
“Nothing but some—verses, mother,” said the boy, with a blush and a laugh, though he was not insensible to the importance of Mr. Todhunter’s communication. Cosmo’s vanity was not sufficiently rampant to say poems. “I did not send them with my name. I wanted to do something better before I showed them to you.”
“And here they’re wanting the callant for a magazine!” cried the Mistress. “Naething but a bairn—the youngest! a laddie that was never out of Norlaw till within six months time! And I warrant they ken what’s for their ain profit, and what kind of a lad they’re seeking after—and me this very night thinking him nae better than a bairn!”
And the Mistress laughed in the mood of exquisite pride at its highest point of gratification, and followed up her laugh by tears of the same. The boy was pleased, but his mother was intoxicated. The North British Courant and the Auld Reekie Magazine were glorious in her eyes as celestial messengers of fame, and she could not but follow the movements of her boy with the amazed observation of a sudden discovery. He who was “naething but a bairn” had already proved himself a genius, and Literature urgent called him to her aid. He might be a Scott—he might turn out a Shakespeare. The Mistress looked at him with no limit to her wonder, and for the moment none in her faith.
“And just as good a laddie as he aye was,” she murmured to herself, stroking his hair fondly—“though mony a ane’s head would have been clean turned to see themsels in a printed paper—no’ to say in a book. Eh, bairn! and to think how little I kent, that am your mother, what God had put among my very bairns!”
“Mother, it may turn out poor enough, after all,” cried Cosmo, half ashamed—“I don’t know yet myself what I can do.”
“I daresay no’,” said the Mistress, proudly, “but you may take my word this decent man does, Cosmo, seeing his ain interest is concerned. Na, laddie, I ken, if you dinna, the ways of this world, and I wouldna say but they think they’ve got just a prize in my bairn. Eh! if the laddies were but here and kent!—and oh, Cosmo! what he would have thought of it that’s gone!”
When the Mistress had dried her eyes, she managed to draw from the boy a gradual confession that the North British Courant, sundry numbers of it, were snugly hid in his own trunk up stairs, from which concealment they were brought forth with much shamefacedness by Cosmo, and read with the greatest triumph by his mother. The Mistress had no mind to go to rest that night—she staid up looking at him—wondering over him; and Cosmo confessed to some of his hitherto secret fancies—how he would like to go abroad to see new countries, and to hear strange tongues, and how he had longed to labor for himself.