`Would you like to see a city given over,
Soul and body, to a tyrannising game?
If you would, there's little need to be a rover,
For St. Andrews is the abject city's name.'
He was fond, too fond, of long midnight walks, for in these he
overtasked his strength, and he had all a young man's contempt for
maxims about not sitting in wet clothes and wet boots. Early in his
letters he speaks of bad colds, and it is matter of tradition that
he despised flannel. Most of us have been like him, and have found
pleasure in wading Tweed, for example, when chill with snaw-bree.
In brief, while reading about Murray's youth most men must feel that
they are reading, with slight differences, about their own. He
writes thus of his long darkling tramps, in a rhymed epistle to his
friend C. C. C.
`And I fear we never again shall go,
The cold and weariness scorning,
For a ten mile walk through the frozen snow
At one o'clock in the morning:
Out by Cameron, in by the Grange,
And to bed as the moon descended . . .
To you and to me there has come a change,
And the days of our youth are ended.
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