I believe we shall have to leave this place; it is low, damp, and mauchy; the rain it raineth every day; and the glass goes tol-de-rol-de-riddle.
Yet it’s a bonny bit; I wish I could live in it, but doubt. I wish I was well away somewhere else. I feel like flight some days; honour bright.
Pirbright Smith is well. Old Mr. Pegfurth Bannatyne is here staying at a country inn. His whole baggage is a pair of socks and a book in a fishing-basket; and he borrows even a rod from the landlord. He walked here over the hills from Sanquhar, “singin’,” he says, “like a mavis.” I naturally asked him about Hazlitt. “He wouldnae take his drink,” he said, “a queer, queer fellow.” But did not seem further communicative. He says he has become “releegious,” but still swears like a trooper. I asked him if he had no headquarters. “No likely,” said he. He says he is writing his memoirs, which will be interesting. He once met Borrow; they boxed; “and Geordie,” says the old man chuckling, “gave me the damnedest hiding.” Of Wordsworth he remarked, “He wasnae sound in the faith, sir, and a milk-blooded, blue-spectacled bitch forbye. But his po’mes are grand—there’s no denying that.” I asked him what his book was. “I havenae mind,” said he—that was his only book! On turning it out, I found it was one of my own, and on showing it to him, he remembered it at once. “O aye,” he said, “I mind now. It’s pretty bad; ye’ll have to do better than that, chieldy,” and chuckled, chuckled. He is a strange old figure, to be sure. He cannot endure Pirbright Smith—“a mere æsthatic,” he said. “Pooh!” “Fishin’ and releegion—these are my aysthatics,” he wound up.
I thought this would interest you, so scribbled it down. I still hope to get more out of him about Hazlitt, though he utterly pooh-poohed the idea of writing H.’s life. “Ma life now,” he said, “there’s been queer things in it.” He is seventy-nine! but may well last to a hundred!—Yours ever,
R. L. S.
[28] In San Francisco.
[29] “The whole front of the house was lighted, and there were pipes and fiddles, and as much dancing and deray within as used to be in Sir Robert’s house at Pace and Yule, and such high seasons.”—See Wandering Willie’s Tale in Redgauntlet, borrowed perhaps from Christ’s Kirk of the Green.
[30] The Davoser Landwasser.