DEAR DAVID,

I TOLD you that Mr —— had sent me a letter of introduction to Mr Mackenzie, the Man of Feeling, and I need not tell you, that such an introduction to such a man, was as agreeable a circumstance as any that could have fallen in my way. I made all haste to deliver my credentials, but was told, when I called at his house, that the old gentleman had gone out a-riding. I really had no expectation of hearing his absence accounted for in that way, for I had always been accustomed to think of him as of one who had entirely outlived his contemporaries, and who must, therefore, be long past the years of active exertion. My surprise, however, was an agreeable one, and I prepared myself to find the veteran, when I should have the fortune to see him, a yet more interesting person than I had taught myself to look for.

Yesterday morning I received a note from him, in which he apologized for not having immediately returned my call. He was extremely busy, he said, all the morning, but hoped I would come and dine with him in an unceremonious manner, the first day I found myself disengaged. I had half promised to dine at a tavern with one or two young gentlemen, friends of Wastle; but my curiosity was such, that I forthwith excused myself in that quarter, and accepted Mr Mackenzie's invitation for the same day on which it reached me. I assure you, that I should not have grudged my journey to Scotland, although I had laid up nothing to bring back with me, excepting the recollection of this one day.

As I walked in the direction of his house, with the certainty that a few minutes would bring me into his company, I was conscious of an almost superstitious feeling—a mysterious kind of expectation—something like what I can conceive to have been felt by the Armenian, when the deep green curtain hung before him, the uplifting of which, he was assured, would open to him a view into departed years, and place before his eyes the actual bodily presence of his long buried ancestor. I had read his works when yet in the years of my infancy.