There are plenty of materials for judging what
sort of a boy Scott was. In spite of his lameness, he early taught
himself to clamber about with an agility that few children could have
surpassed, and to sit his first pony--a little Shetland, not bigger
than a large Newfoundland dog, which used to come into the house to be
fed by him--even in gallops on very rough ground. He became very early
a declaimer. Having learned the ballad of Hardy Knute, he shouted it
forth with such pertinacious enthusiasm that the clergyman of his
grandfather's parish complained that he "might as well speak in a
cannon's mouth as where that child was." At six years of age Mrs.
Cockburn described him as the most astounding genius of a boy, she
ever saw. "He was reading a poem to his mother when I went in. I made
him read on: it was the description of a shipwreck. His passion rose
with the storm. 'There's the mast gone,' says he; 'crash it goes; they
will all perish.' After his agitation he turns to me, 'That is too
melancholy,' says he; 'I had better read you something more amusing.
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