Note 82 — Chapter XLVII

We were all delighted to see how completely Scott had recovered his bodily vigor, and none more so than Constable, who, as he puffed and panted after him up one ravine and down another, often stopped to wipe his forehead, and remarked that "it was not every author who should lead him such a dance." But Purdie's face shone with rapture as he observed how severely the swag-bellied bookseller's activity was tasked. Scott exclaiming exultingly, though perhaps for the tenth time, "This will be a glorious spring for our trees, Tom!"—"You may say that, Shirra," quoth Tom,—and then lingering a moment for Constable—"My certy," he added, scratching his head, "and I think it will be a grand season for our buiks too." But indeed Tom always talked of our buiks as if they had been as regular products of the soil as our aits and our birks.[82] Having threaded, first the Haxelcleugh, and then the Rhymer's Glen, we arrived at Huntly Burn, where the hospitality of the kind Weird-Sisters, as Scott called the Miss Fergusons, reanimated our exhausted Bibliopoles, and gave them courage to extend their walk a little further down the same famous brook. Here there was a small cottage in a very sequestered situation, by making some little additions to which Scott thought it might be converted into a suitable summer residence for his daughter and future son-in-law. The details of that plan were soon settled—it was agreed on all hands that a sweeter scene of seclusion could not be fancied. He repeated some verses of Rogers's Wish, which paint the spot:—