XII. OTTERBURN 461

in all, Carlyle thought-“big-bellied persons, sympathetic bailies, relieving each other in carrying the pall.” The boys collected in a group, as it passed within the railings, uttered a low “Ah me! Ah dear!” or the like, half sigh or wail-“and he is gone from us then!”

“The sound of the boys’ wail is in my ears yet,” said Carlyle.

230. His own first teacher in Latin, an old clergyman. He had indeed been sent first to a schoolmaster in his own village, “the joyfullest little mortal, he believed, on earth,” learning his declensions out of an eighteen-penny book! giving his whole might and heart to understand. And the master could teach him nothing, merely involved him day by day in misery of non-understanding, the boy getting crushed and sick, till (his mother?) saw it, and then he was sent to this clergyman, “a perfect sage, on the humblest scale.” Seventy pounds a year, his income at first entering into life; never more than a hundred. Six daughters and two sons; the eldest sister, Margaret, “a little bit lassie,”-then in a lower voice, “the flower of all the flock to me.” Returning from her little visitations to the poor, dressed in her sober prettiest, “the most amiable of possible objects.” Not beautiful in any notable way afterwards, but “comely in the highest degree.” With dutiful sweetness, “the right hand of her father.” Lived to be seven-and-twenty. “The last time that I wept aloud in the world, I think was at her death.”

Riding down from Craigenputtock to Dumfries,-“a monstrous precipice of rocks on one hand of you, a merry brook on the other side.... In the night just before sunrise.”

He was riding down, he and his brother, to fetch away her body,-they having just heard of her death.

A surveyor (?), or some scientific and evidently superior kind of person, had been doing work which involved staying near, or in, her father’s house, and they got engaged, and then he broke it off. “They said that was the beginning of it.” The death had been so sudden, and so unexpected,

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