550 PRÆTERITA-III

snug, surrounded by its banks, and a screen of furze in full bloom.” Of whom the youngest, Benjie, at first

“somewhat dismayed at my appearance, but calculating on my placability, ... almost in one breath assured the itinerants that I was ‘a grand gentleman, and had plenty of money, and was very kind to poor folk,’ and informed me that this was ‘Willie Steenson, Wandering Willie, the best fiddler that ever kittled thairm (cat-gut) with horse-hair.’ ... I asked him if he was of this country. ‘This country!’ replied the blind man, ‘I am of every country in broad Scotland, and a wee bit of England to the boot. But yet I am in some sense of this country, for I was born within hearing of the roar of Solway.’”

76. I must pause again to tell the modern reader that no word is ever used by Scott in a hackneyed sense. For three hundred years of English commonplace, roar has rhymed to shore, as breeze to trees; yet in this sentence the word is as powerful as if it had never been written till now! for no other sound of the sea is for an instant comparable to the breaking of deep ocean, as it rises over great spaces of sand. In its rise and fall on a rocky coast, it is either perfectly silent, or, if it strike, it is with a crash, or a blow like that of a heavy gun. Therefore, under ordinary conditions, there may be either splash, or crash, or sigh, or boom; but not roar. But the hollow sound of the countless ranks of surety breakers, rolling mile after mile in ceaseless following, every one of them with the apparent anger and threatening of a fate which is assured death unless fled from,-the sound of this approach, over quicksands, and into inextricable gulfs of mountain bay, this, heard far out at sea, or heard far inland, through the peace of secure night -or stormless day, is still an eternal voice, with the harmony in it of a mighty law, and the gloom of a mortal warning.

The old man “preluded as he spoke ... and then taking the old tune of ‘Galashiels’¹ for his theme, he graced it with a number of wild, complicated and beautiful variations; during which it was wonderful to observe how his sightless face was lighted up under the conscious pride and heartfelt delight in the exercise of his own very considerable powers.

“’What think you of that now, for three score and twa?’”

¹ [See Fors Clavigera, Letter 31 (Vol. XXVII. p. 582).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]