Roamin’ in the gloamin’ (1928)

ROAMIN' IN THE GLOAMIN' 147 derful world that had been opened up for me as if by magic. Here let me make a confession. After a week or two in the turmoil and frenzy I made up my mind that I liked the folks very much indeed but that I would sooner die than spend the rest of my days in New York! It "deaved" me to death. A sense of oppression came over me. I "felt that of a certainty one or other of the big buildings would fall on me. The cumulative effect of all this was a sense of choking — I was always fighting for breath, as it were. Two friendships I made on this visit which meant much to me then, and they have become stronger and stronger with the passage of time. Colonel Walter Scott swam into my ken the first week I opened at the New York Theatre. His breezy, straightforward, generous personality, added to the fact that he seemed to be more Scottish than I was myself, appealed to me at once. We fell for each other right away and have been "sworn brithers" for twenty years. An amazing man is Wattie Scott. A native-born American, and proud of it, he is yet the most perfervid lover of Scotland and all things Scottish that the world has ever seen. His affection for the land of his forebears is a religion with him. He is qualified to take a post as a professor of Scottish history and character in any university. The lore of Scotland from time immemorial is an open book to him; he sleeps with a copy of Burns beneath his pillow. Walter is the perpetual president of a thousand St. Andrew's Societies and Burns' Clubs scattered throughout every state in the union ; no Scottish Clan association is "worth a docken" if Wattie's name is not on its list of officebearers and financial supporters. All America knows what the colonel did in raising Scottish-American troops for the front in the time of the world war. Not content with his purely Scottish activities he is in the foreground of all good