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 way-farer
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.




CHAPTER V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER


I THINK I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in
the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the southwestern