people told as heavily upon him as upon less patient victims. Little notes scattered throughout his journal reveal his misery, and awaken sympathetic echoes in every long-tried soul. "Of all bores," he writes, "the greatest is to hear a dull and bashful man sing a facetious song." And again, with humorous intensity: "Miss Ayton's father is a bore, after the fashion of all fathers, mothers, aunts, and other chaperons of pretty actresses." And again, this time in a hasty scrawl to Ballantyne:—
"Oh, James! oh, James! two Irish dames
Oppress me very sore:
I groaning send one sheet I've penned,
For, hang them! there's no more."
That Sir Walter forgot his sufferings as soon as they were over is proof, not of callousness, but of magnanimity. He forgave his tormentors the instant they ceased to torment him, and then found time to deplore his previous irritation. "I might at least have asked him to dinner," he was heard murmuring self-reproachfully, when an unscrupulous intruder had at last departed from Abbotsford; and on another occasion, when some impatient lads refused to emulate his forbearance, he recalled
