Note 1 — LETTER XXXIII.

And the main purpose of Fors is to show you that there is, sometimes, in weak natural whistling quite as much virtue as in vigorous steam whistling. But it cannot show you this without explaining what your darg, or ‘doing,’ is; which cannot be shown merely by writing pleasant biographies. You are always willing enough to read lives, but never willing to lead them. For instance, those few sentences, almost casually given in last Fors, about the Scottish rivers, have been copied, I see, into various journals, as if they, at any rate, were worth extract from the much useless matter of my books. Scotchmen like to hear their rivers talked about, it appears! But when last I was up Huntly Burn way, there was no burn there. It had all been drawn off to somebody’s ‘works;’ and it is painful for me, as an author, to reflect that, “of all polluting liquids belonging to this category (liquid refuse from manufactories), the discharges from paper works are the most difficult to deal with.”1