LETTER TO FINLAY. 95 



boy-friend, whom I loved so much and regretted so long, 

 have been dead for the last twelve years. I could 

 think of you as a present existence only in relation to the 

 other world ; in your relation to this one merely as a 

 recollection of the past. And yet here is a kind, affec- 

 tionate letter, so full of heart that it has opened all the 

 sluices of mine, that assures me your pulses are still 

 beating, and shows me they desire to beat for ever. I 

 cannot tell you how much and often I have thought of 

 you, and how sincerely the man has longed after and 

 regretted the friend of the bo?/; you were lost to me ere I 

 knew how much I valued and loved you. I dare say you 

 don't remember that shortly before you left Cromarty you 

 scrawled your name with a piece of burnt stick on the 

 eastern side of Marcus Cave, a little within the opening. 

 I have renewed these characters twenty and twenty 

 times ; and it was not until a few years ago, when a 

 party of gipsies took possession of the cave, and smoked 

 it all as black as a chimney, that they finally disappeared. 

 Two verses of the little pastoral you wrote on leaving us 

 are fresh in my memory still fresh as if I had learned 

 them only yesterday. But I dare say at this distance of 

 time you will scarce recognize them. 



" Ye shepherds, who merrily sing 



And laugh out the long summer day, 

 Expert at the ball and the ring, 

 Whose lives are one circle of play, 



" To you my dear flock I resign, 



My colley, my crook, and my horn ; 

 To leave you, indeed, I repine, 

 But I must away with the morn." 



' There they are, just as you left them in the winter 

 of 1819. What, dear Pinlay, have the seventeen inter- 

 vening years been doing with your face and figure ? The 



