The Dee, the Don, Balgounie's brig's black wall,
All my boy feelings, all my gentler dreams
Of what I _then dreamt_, clothed in their own pall,
Like Banquo's offspring;--floating past me seems
My childhood in this childishness of mine;
I care not--'tis a glimpse of "Auld Lang Syne."

He adds in a note, "The Brig of Don, near the 'auld town' of Aberdeen,
with its one arch and its black deep salmon stream, is in my memory as
yesterday. I still remember, though perhaps I may misquote the awful
proverb which made me pause to cross it, and yet lean over it with a
childish delight, being an only son, at least by the mother's side.
The saying, as recollected by me, was this, but I have never heard or
seen it since I was nine years of age:--

"'Brig of Balgounie, _black_'s your wa',
Wi' a wife's _ae son_, and a mear's ae foal,
Down ye shall fa'.'"[21]

To meet with an Aberdonian was, at all times, a delight to him; and
when the late Mr. Scott, who was a native of Aberdeen, paid him a
visit at Venice in the year 1819, in talking of the haunts of his
childhood, one of the places he particularly mentioned was
Wallace-nook, a spot where there is a rude statue of the Scottish
chief still standing. From first to last, indeed, these recollections
of the country of his youth never forsook him. In his early voyage
into Greece, not only the shapes of the mountains, but the kilts and
hardy forms of the Albanese,--all, as he says, "carried him back to
Morven;" and, in his last fatal expedition, the dress which he himself
chiefly wore at Cephalonia was a tartan jacket.