Every book has a beginning, and the beginning of every book is the undoubted spot on which the historian is bound to parade his hero. The novelist may therefore continue to envelope his man in a fog as long as he likes, but for myself I shall at once unfold to the world that I am my own hero; and though that same world hold my countrymen to be rich in wants, with the article of modesty among them, yet do I hope to maintain the character I have assumed, with as much propriety as can reasonably be expected of one labouring under such a national infirmity, for
"I am a native of that land, which
Some poets' lips and painters' hands"
have pictured barren and treeless. But to shew that these are mere fancy sketches, I need only mention that as long as I remember anything, there grew a bonny brier and sundry gooseberry bushes in our kail-yard, and it was surrounded by a stately row of pines, rearing their long spinster waists and umbrella heads over the cabbages, as carefully as a hen does her wings over her brood of chickens, so that neither the sun nor moon, and but a very few favoured stars had the slightest chance of getting a peep therein, nor had anything therein a chance of getting a peep out, unless in the cabbages returning the sheep's eyes of their star-gazers; for, while the front was protected by a long range of house and offices, with no ingress or egress but through the hall-door, the same duty was performed on the other three sides by a thick quick-set hedge which was impervious to all but the sparrows, so that the wondrous wise man of Islington might there have scratched his eyes out and in again a dozen times without being much the wiser.
My father was the laird and farmed the small property I speak of, in
