BY A FARMER.

VI.


I begin my day with a canny Scot, who was born in Edinburgh in 1726,
near which city his father conducted a large market-garden. As a youth,
aged nineteen, John Abercrombie (for it is of him I make companion this
wet morning) saw the Battle of Preston Pans, at which the Highlanders
pushed the King's-men in defeat to the very foot of his father's
garden-wall. Whether he shouldered a matchlock for the Castle-people and
Sir John Hope, or merely looked over from the kale-beds at the
victorious fighters for Prince Charley, I cannot learn; it is certain
only that before Culloden, and the final discomfiture of the Pretender,
he avowed himself a good King's-man, and in many an after-year, over his
pipe and his ale, told the story of the battle which surged wrathfully
around his father's kale-garden by Preston Pans.

But he did not stay long in Scotland; he became gardener for Sir James
Douglas, into whose family (below-stairs) he eventually married;
afterwards he had experience in the royal gardens at Kew, and in
Leicester Fields. Finally he became proprietor of a patch of ground in
the neighborhood of London; and his success here, added to his success
in other service, gave him such reputation that he was one day waited
upon (about the year 1770) by Mr. Davis, a London bookseller, who
invited him to dine at an inn in Hackney; and at the dinner he was
introduced to a certain Oliver Goldsmith, an awkward man, who had
published four years before a book called "The Vicar of Wakefield." Mr.
Davis thought John Abercrombie was competent to write a good practical