'I remember, when a little boy, getting my first introduction to the novels of Walter Scott - then the "Great Unknown". One of my sisters, when an infant, was sent to the country to be nursed; and I used to accompany Peg Nielson, our servant, to see the child on Saturday afternoons... Peg was a capital story-teller and many a time did she entertain us with "auld warld" tales of brownies, fairies, ghosts and witches, often making our flesh creep. But she could also be amusing and cheerful in the adventures she narrated. While on the way to Clerkington Mains, I asked her to tell me a story. "Yes she would: it was a story of a gypsy woman and a little boy who was carried away in a ship by the smugglers." And then she began, and told me, in a manner that seemed most graphic, the wonderful adventures of Harry Bertram and Meg Merrilies, as related in the well-known novel of "Guy Mannering". Many years after I read the book and found that she had omitted nothing of the story: her memory was so good and her power of narration so excellent.'