The writer W. S. Crockett considered Edie Ochiltree to be more firmly based on a real-life model than any other of Scott's characters, Jonathan Oldbuck alone excepted. His original was one Andrew Gemmels, a beggar whom Scott, then a boy in Kelso, had often met. Gemmels came from the parish of Old Cumnock in Ayrshire, and he was, like Ochiltree, an army veteran who had fought at the battle of Fontenoy. Scott described him in his introduction to the 1829 edition of "The Antiquary" as "a remarkably fine old figure, very tall, and maintaining a soldierlike or military manner and address. His features were intelligent, with a powerful expression of sarcasm…It was some fear of Andrew's satire, as much as a feeling of kindness or charity, which secured him the general good reception which he enjoyed everywhere." He prospered better than most beggars, and died, by his own reckoning, at the age of 105, leaving a small fortune to a nephew.