AMUSEMENTS. 39 



peared, I forsook the grind-stone/ He fell in with a 

 book on natural magic, palmistry, and astrology, and for 

 a time went wool-gathering upon that particular range 

 of the mountains of vanity. He became a sufficient 

 adept in palmistry to make out, from a perusal of the 

 mystic characters inscribed on the palm of his left hand, 

 that his life was to be strange and eventful, that he was 

 to become a revolutionary leader, and that he was to 

 die, like Wallace, on the scaffold. Verse-writing, prose- 

 writing, and ' a third sort of composition which imitated 

 the style of Macpherson's Ossian' were engaged in, 

 probably with fitfulness, but with passionate enjoyment. 



His principal amusement at this period, however, was 

 one of which he has singularly enough omitted mention in 

 the Schools and Schoolmasters. He drew the map of a 

 country in the sand, and, having collected quantities of 

 variously-coloured shells from the beach, arranged them so 

 as to represent its inhabitants. Appointing himself king 

 of the miniature community, he designed its towns, roads, 

 canals, harbours, and other public works. He ruled his 

 dominions by every different form of government with 

 which he was acquainted, and attacked or defended 

 them by every stratagem of war with which books or 

 his uncles had made him familiar. 



In his fourteenth year all other amusements yielded 

 to that of heading a band of his school-fellows, with 

 whom, in the harvest vacation, he spent every day, from 

 dawn to sunset, in or about a deep cavern, penetrating one 

 of the steepest precipices which skirt the southern base 

 of the hill of Cromarty. One of the brotherhood brought 

 a pot, another a pitcher; the shore supplied shell-fish, 

 the wood fuel, the fields potatoes, pease, and beans ; and 

 so they went a-gipsying the long summer day. 



' The time not employed in cooking/ says Miller in 



