in the South Street of St. Andrews, a city not far from our house of
Pitcullo. But there, like a wayward boy, I took more pleasure in the
battles of the "nations"--as of Fife against Galloway and the Lennox; or
in games of catch-pull, football, wrestling, hurling the bar, archery,
and golf--than in divine learning--as of logic, and Aristotle his
analytics.

Yet I loved to be in the scriptorium of the Abbey, and to see the good
Father Peter limning the blessed saints in blue, and red, and gold, of
which art he taught me a little. Often I would help him to grind his
colours, and he instructed me in the laying of them on paper or vellum,
with white of egg, and in fixing and burnishing the gold, and in drawing
flowers, and figures, and strange beasts and devils, such as we see
grinning from the walls of the cathedral. In the French language, too,
he learned me, for he had been taught at the great University of Paris;
and in Avignon had seen the Pope himself, Benedict XIII., of uncertain
memory.

Much I loved to be with Father Peter, whose lessons did not irk me, but
jumped with my own desire to read romances in the French tongue, whereof
there are many. But never could I have dreamed that, in days to come,
this art of painting would win me my bread for a while, and that a Leslie
of Pitcullo should be driven by hunger to so base and contemned a
handiwork, unworthy, when practised for gain, of my blood.

Yet it would have been well for me to follow even this craft more, and my
sports and pastimes less: Dickon Melville had then escaped a broken head,
and I, perchance, a broken heart. But youth is given over to vanities
that war against the soul, and, among others, to that wicked game of the
Golf, now justly cried down by our laws, {2} as the mother of cursing and