464 PRÆTERITA-II

I must give one piece more of his own letter, with the following fragment, written in the earlier part of this year, and meant to have been carried on into some detail of the impressions received in my father’s native Edinburgh, and on the northern coast, from Queen’s Ferry round by Prestonpans to Dunbar and Berwick.

Dr. Brown goes on:¹-“A year ago, I found an elderly countrywoman, a widow, waiting for me. Rising up, she said, ‘D’ ye mind me?’ I looked at her, but could get nothing from her face; but the voice remained in my ear, as if coming from the ‘fields of sleep,’ and I said by a sort of instinct, ‘Tibbie Meek!’ I had not seen her or heard her voice for more than forty years.”

233. The reader will please note the pure Scotch phrase “D’ ye mind me?” and compare Meg Merrilies’ use of it:²-

“At length she guided them through the mazes of the wood to a little open glade of about a quarter of an acre, surrounded by trees and bushes, which made a wild and irregular* boundary. Even in winter, it was a sheltered and snugly sequestered spot; but when arrayed in the verdure of spring, the earth sending forth all its wild flowers; the shrubs spreading their waste of blossom around it, and the weeping birches, which towered over the underwood, drooping their long and leafy fibres to intercept the sun, it must have seemed a place for a youthful poet to study his earliest sonnet, or a pair of lovers to exchange their first mutual avowal of affection. Apparently it now awakened very different recollections. Bertram’s brow, when he had looked round the spot, became gloomy and embarrassed. Meg, after muttering to herself, ‘This is the very spot,’ looked at him with a ghastly side glance,-’D’ye mind it?’

“‘Yes,’ answered Bertram, ‘imperfectly I do.’

“‘Ay,’ pursued his guide, ‘on this very spot the man fell from his horse-I was behind that bourtree †-bush at the very moment. Now will I show you the further track-the last time ye travelled it, was in these arms.’”

That was twenty years before.

* It might have been “irregular,” in ground just cut up for building leases, in South Lambeth; wild, yet as regular as a disciplined army, had it been the pines of Uri. It was a “waste of blossom,” a shade of weeping birches.

† Elder, in modern Scotch; but in the Douglas glossary,3 Bower-bush.

¹ [In a footnote to p. 414 of the book cited above, p. 459 n.]

² [Guy Mannering, ch. iii.]

³ [The glossary appended to the 1710 edition of Bishop Douglas’s translation of the Æneid: see Vol. XXXIV. p. 300 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]