Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/143

Rh From Montrose the road led through a country rich with an abundant harvest that was almost ripe for the sickle, but bare of everything but crops. Even the hedges, said Johnson, were of stone. Boswells calls this a ludicrous description, but it could have been easily defended as good Scotch, for in the Scots Magazine for January of the previous year, we read of "the stone hedges of Scotland." It is strange that Johnson had not noticed these roughly-built walls in Northumberland, for in the northern part of that county, according to Pennant, "hedges were still in their infancy. At Laurencekirk our travellers stopped to dine,



and "respectfully remembered that great grammarian Ruddiman`," who had spent four years there as schoolmaster. More than seventy years before their visit, Dr. Pitcairne, the author of that Latin epitaph on Dundee which Dryden translated, being weatherbound at the village inn, "inquired if there were no persons who could interchange conversation and partake of his dinner." The hostess mentioned Ruddiman. He came, pleased Pitcairne, and was by him brought to Edinburgh. Francis Garden, one of the Scotch judges, under the title of Lord Gardenston, the laird and