Out of this book
alluvium a hole seemed to have been dug near the fireplace, just big enough
to hold his arm-chair and a table, book-strewn like everything else, and
garnished with odds and ends of MSS., and a snuffer-tray containing scraps
of half-smoked tobacco, "pipe-dottles," as he called them, which were
carefully resmoked over and over again, till nothing but ash was left.
His whole culinary utensils--for he cooked as well as eat in this strange
hole--were an old rusty kettle, which stood on one hob, and a blue plate
which, when washed, stood on the other. A barrel of true Aberdeen meal
peered out of a corner, half buried in books, and a "keg o' whusky, the
gift o' freens," peeped in like case out of another.
This was his only food. "It was a' poison," he used to say, "in London.
Bread full o' alum and bones, and sic filth--meat over-driven till it was
a' braxy--water sopped wi' dead men's juice. Naething was safe but gude
Scots parrich and Athol brose." He carried his water-horror so far as to
walk some quarter of a mile every morning to fill his kettle at a favourite
pump.
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