This poor
unfortunate man's name was David Ritchie, a native of Tweeddale. He was
the son of a labourer in the slate-quarries of Stobo, and must have
been born in the misshapen form which he exhibited, though he sometimes
imputed it to ill-usage when in infancy. He was bred a brush-maker at
Edinburgh, and had wandered to several places, working at his trade,
from all which he was chased by the disagreeable attention which his
hideous singularity of form and face attracted wherever he came. The
author understood him to say he had even been in Dublin.
Tired at length of being the object of shouts, laughter, and derision,
David Ritchie resolved, like a deer hunted from the herd, to retreat to
some wilderness, where he might have the least possible communication
with the world which scoffed at him. He settled himself, with this view,
upon a patch of wild moorland at the bottom of a bank on the farm
of Woodhouse, in the sequestered vale of the small river Manor, in
Peeblesshire. The few people who had occasion to pass that way were much
surprised, and some superstitious persons a little alarmed, to see so
strange a figure as Bow'd Davie (i.
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