past achievements. In his eighteenth year he taught himself to read,
choosing as his text-books Henry the Minstrel's _Life and Adventures
of Sir William Wallace_ and the _Gentle Shepherd_ of Allan Ramsay.
Not until his twenty-sixth year did he acquire the art of penmanship,
which he learned "upon the hillside by copying the Italian alphabet,
using his knee as his desk, and having the ink-bottle suspended from
his button." During the next fourteen years he followed his shepherd's
calling, making it romantic with sundry more or less successful
attempts at authorship. He had reached his fortieth year before he
abandoned sheep-raising and journeyed to Edinburgh, there definitely
to adopt the literary career. He was by this time firm in his
philosophy of life and established in his modes of thought; whatever
else he might not be, among townsmen and persons of artificial
training, his very simplicity was sure to make him original. In his
forty-seventh year, having so far cast his most important work
into the poetic form, he contributed to _Blackwood's Magazine_ his
_Shepherd's Calendar_, followed in the same year by the publishing of
_The Brownie of Bodsbeck_; these were his first two serious excursions
into the realm of prose-fiction. From then on until his death, in
1835, he continued his efforts in this direction, pouring out a mass
of country-side tradition and fairy-folklore, amazing in its fantasy
and wealth of drama.

For the imparting of _atmosphere_ to his stories, a talent so
conspicuously lacking not only in his predecessors, but also in many
of his contemporaries, he had a native faculty. The author of _Bonny
Kilmeny_ could scarcely fail in this respect, when he turned his
attention from poetry to prose. He had lived too close to nature to be
able ever to keep the green and silver of woods and rivers far from
his thoughts; they were the mirrors in which his fancy saw itself.