420 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



perfectly new ; and to attain originality he would have 

 only to describe. I reckon that one of the advantages 

 of my place in society (it would require to have some, 

 for the disadvantages incident to it are somewhat numer- 

 ous), that it commands a wide and diversified prospect 

 of the latter description. 



' This part of the country contains a rich and as yet 

 unexplored mine of tradition ; but some of the stories 

 are of too wild and fantastic a character for furnishing a 

 suitable basis for a prose tale ; and the great bulk of 

 them, though they might prove interesting when wrought 

 up together, are too simple and too naked of both detail 

 and description to stand alone. They resemble some of 

 the minuter flowers, that scarcely appear beautiful until 

 bound up in a nosegay. 



' Conversation to me proves generally an imperfect 

 medium for the conveyance of thought ; and I expressed 

 myself rather loosely in what I said when in your com- 

 pany in Cromarty regarding the assistance which, in 

 detailing these traditions, my memory derives from my 

 imagination. Imagination frequently assists me in giving 

 a something like life to narratives which were before 

 dead. It draws landscapes, too, around the figures to 

 which tradition has introduced me, and sometimes furn- 

 ishes these figures with the language of dialogue. This, 

 however, was not at all what I at that time had meant 

 to state ; but I may, perhaps, be more happy in convey- 

 ing my meaning by the pen. The faculty of my mind 

 which was first developed was imagination, and the de- 

 velopment was neither partial nor gradual. Before I 

 had attained my fifth year I had become the inhabitant 

 of two distinct worlds, the true and the ideal ; and the 

 images of the latter appeared to me scarcely less tangible 

 or less clearly defined than those of the former. My 



