From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own
papers. The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my
best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it
remains invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would
print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any
worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly
to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves; so that in this
volume of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the Swanston gardener,
may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston shepherd. Not that John
and Robert drew very close together in their lives; for John was
rough, he smelt of the windy brae; and Robert was gentle, and smacked
of the garden in the hollow. Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked
John the better of the two; he had grit and dash, and that salt of the
Old Adam that pleases men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he
was a wayfarer besides, and took my gipsy fancy. But however that may
be, and however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch
that follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature,
whom, if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should
like well to draw again with a maturer touch. And as I think of him
and of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be
found dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the
woody fold of a green hill.