affected by the
unusual attention with which I had cultivated his acquaintance and listened to
his conversation. After he had mounted, not without difficulty, the old white
pony, he took me by the hand and said, The blessing of our Master be with you,
young man! My hours are like the ears of the latter harvest, and your days are
yet in the spring; and yet you may be gathered into the garner of mortality
before me, for the sickle of death cuts down the green as oft as the ripe, and
there is a colour in your cheek, that, like the bud of the rose, serveth oft to
hide the worm of corruption. Wherefore labour as one who knoweth not when his
Master calleth. And if it be my lot to return to this village after ye are gane
hame to your ain place, these auld withered hands will frame a stane of
memorial, that your name may not perish from among the people.
    I thanked Old Mortality for his kind intentions in my behalf, and heaved a
sigh, not I think, of regret, so much as of resignation, to think of the chance
that I might soon require his good offices. But though, in all human
probability, he did not err in supposing that my span of life may be abridged in
youth, he had over-estimated the period of his own pilgrimage on earth. It is
now some years since he has been missed in all his usual haunts, while moss,
lichen, and deer- are fast covering those stones, to cleanse which had been the
business of his life. About the beginning of this century, he closed his mortal
toils, being found on the highway near Lockerby, in Dumfriesshire, exhausted and
just expiring. The old white pony, the companion of all his wanderings, was
standing by the side of his dying master. There was found about his person a sum
of money sufficient for his decent interment, which serves to show that his
death was in no ways hastened by violence or by want. The common people still
regard his memory with great respect; and many are of opinion, that the stones
which he repaired will not again require the assistance of the chisel. They even
assert, that on the tombs where the manner of the martyr's murder is recorded,
their names have remained indelibly legible since the death of Old Mortality,
while those of the persecutors, sculptured on the same monuments, have been
entirely defaced. It is hardly necessary to say that this is a fond imagination,
and that, since the time of the pious pilgrim,