The young lady admired the verses, but, as we have seen, declined the translator.

Perhaps she regarded banking as safer, if less brilliant work than the most effective description of skeleton riders.

Indeed, Scott at this time--to those who did not know what was in him, which no one, not even excepting himself, did--had no very sure prospects of comfort, to say nothing of wealth.
It is curious, too, that his first adventure in literature was thus connected with his interest in the preternatural, for no man ever lived whose genius was sounder and healthier, and less disposed to dwell on the half-and-half lights of a dim and eerie world; yet ghostly subjects always interested him deeply, and he often touched them in his stories, more, I think, from the strong artistic contrast they afforded to his favourite conceptions of life, than from any other motive.

There never was, I fancy, an organization less susceptible of this order of fears and superstitions than his own.
When a friend jokingly urged him, within a few months of his death, not to leave Rome on a Friday, as it was a day of bad omen for a journey, he replied, laughing, "Superstition is very picturesque, and I make it, at times, stand me in great stead, but I never allow it to interfere with interest or convenience." Basil Hall reports Scott's having told him on the last evening of the year 1824, when they were talking over this subject, that "having once arrived at a country inn, he was told there was no bed for him.

'No place to lie down at all ?' said he.