Note 15 — LETTER XXXII.

In the rude lines describing such passing of hours quoted by Scott in his introduction to the ‘Border Minstrelsy,’15 you find the grandmother spinning, with her stool next the hearth,—“for she was old, and saw right dimly” (fire-light, observe, all that was needed even then;) “she spins to make a web of good Scots linen,” (can you show such now, from your Glasgow mills?) The father is pulling hemp (or beating it). The only really beautiful piece of song which I heard at Verona, during several months’ stay there in 1869, was the low chant of girls unwinding the cocoons of the silkworm, in the cottages among the olive-clad hills on the north of the city. Never any in the streets of it;—there, only insane shrieks of Republican populace, or senseless dance-music, played by operatic-military bands.