He shared with me his supper and bed for the night; and, after rising in the morning ere I awoke, and writing a long letter for Robert, which he gave me in the hope I might soon meet with him, he accompanied me to the vessel, then on the eve of sailing, and we parted, as it proved, for ever. I know nothing of his after life, or how or where it terminated; but I have learned that, shortly before the death of his gifted brother, his circumstances enabled him to send his mother a small remittance for the use of the family. He was evidently one of the kind-hearted, improvident few, who can share a very little, and whose destiny it is to have only a very little to share.
CHAPTER V.
"O Ferguson! thy glorious parts
Ill suited law's dry, musty arts!
My curse upon your whunstane hearts,
Ye Embrugh gentry!
The tithe o' what ye waste at cartes
Wad stow'd his pantry!"
Burns.
I visited Edinburgh, for the first time, in the latter part of the autumn of 1773, about two months after I had sailed from Boston. It was on a fine calm morning—one of those clear sunshiny mornings of October, when the gossamer
goes sailing about in long cottony threads, so light and fleecy that they seem the skeleton remains of extinct cloudlets; and when the distant hills, with their covering of grey frost rime, seem, through the clear cold atmosphere, as if chiselled in marble. The sun was rising over the town through a deep blood-coloured haze—the smoke of a thousand fires; and the huge fantastic piles of masonry that stretched along the ridge, looked dim and spectral through the cloud, like the ghosts of an army of giants. I felt half a foot taller as I strode on towards the town. It was Edinburgh I was approaching—the scene of so many proud associations to a lover of Scotland; and I was going to meet as an early friend one of the first of Scottish poets. I entered the town. There was a book stall in a corner of the street; and I turned aside for half a minute to glance my eye over the books.
"Ferguson's Poems!" I exclaimed, taking up a little volume. "I was not aware they had appeared in a separate form. How do you sell this?"
"Just like a' the ither booksellers," said the man who kept the stall—"that's nane o' the buiks that come doun in a hurry—just for the marked selling price." I threw down the money.
"Could you tell me anything of the writer?" I said. "I have a letter for him from America."
"Oh, that'll be frae his brither Henry, I'll wad; a clever cheild too, but ower fond o' the drap drink, maybe, like Rob himsel'. Baith o' them fine humane chields, though, without a grain o' pride. Rob takes a stan' wi' me sometimes o' half an hour at a time, an' we clatter ower the buiks; an', if I'm no mista'en, yon's him just yonder—the thin, pale slip o' a lad wi' the broad brow. Ay, an' he's just comin' this way."