I
shall not deny that I often looked over my shoulder as I went, and that,
when I reached the loch, I did not angle without many a backward glance.
Such an appearance and disappearance as this, I remembered, were in the
experience of Sir Walter Scott. Lockhart does not tell the anecdote,
which is in a little anonymous volume, "Recollections of Sir Walter
Scott," published before Lockhart's book. Sir Walter reports that he was
once riding across the moor to Ashiesteil, in the clear brown summer
twilight, after sunset. He saw a man a little way ahead of him, but,
just before he reached the spot, the man disappeared. Scott rode about
and about, searching the low heather as I had done, but to no purpose. He
rode on, and, glancing back, saw the same man at the same place. He
turned his horse, galloped to the spot, and again--nothing! "Then," says
Sir Walter, "neither the mare nor I cared to wait any longer." Neither
had I cared to wait, and if there is any shame in the confession, on my
head be it!
There came a week of blazing summer weather; tramping over moors to lochs
like sheets of burnished steel was out of the question, and I worked at
my book, which now was all but finished. At length I wrote THE END, and
"o le bon ouff! que je poussais," as Flaubert says about one of his own
laborious conclusions.
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