The only indication of married life in his room, was an old and strong cradle, which he had cut down so as to rock no more, and which he made the depository of his books-a queer collection.

I have said that he had what he called, with a grave smile, family worship, morning and evening, never failing. He not only sang his psalm, but gave out or chanted the line in great style; and on seeing me one morning surprised at this, he said, "Ye see John, oo," meaning himself and his wife, began that way. He had a firm, true voice, and a genuine though roughish gift of singing, and being methodical in all things, he did what I never heard of in any one else, he had seven fixed tunes, one of which he sang on its own set day. Sabbath morning it was French, which he went through with great birr. Monday, Scarborough, which, he said, was like my father cantering. Tuesday, Coleshill, that soft exquisite air, -monotonous and melancholy, soothing and vague, like the sea. This day, Tuesday, was the day of the week on which his wife and child died, and he always sang more verses then than on any other. Wednesday was Irish; Thursday, Old Hundred; Friday, Bangor; and Saturday, Blackburn, that humdrummest of tunes, as long, and lank, and lean, as is the ribbed sea-sand." He could not defend it, but had some secret reason for sticking to it. As to the evenings, they were just the same tunes in reversed order, only that on Tuesday night he sang Coleshill again, thus dropping Blackburn for evening work. The children could tell the day of the week by Jeems's tune, and would have been as much astonished at hearing Bangor on Monday, as at finding St. Giles's half-way down the Canongate.

I frequently breakfasted with him. He made capital porridge, and I wish I could get such buttermilk, or at least have such a relish for it, as in those days. Jeems is away-gone over to the majority; and I hope I may never forget to be grateful to the dear and queer old man. I think I see and hear him

saying his grace over our bickers with their brats on, then taking his two books out of the cradle and reading, not without a certain homely majesty, the first verse of the 99th Psalm,

"Th' eternal Lord doth reign as king,
Let all the people quake;

He sits between the cherubims,

Let th' earth be mov'd and shake;"

then launching out into the noble depths of Irish. His chapters were long, and his prayers short, very scriptural, but by no means stereotyped, and wonderfully real, immediate, as if he was near Him whom he addressed. Any one hearing the sound and not the words, would say, "That man is speaking to some one who is with him-who is present, -as he often said to me, "There's nae gude dune, John, till ye get

to close grups.'

Now, I dare say you are marvelling-first, Why I brought this grim, old Rhadamanthus, Belzaleel, U. P. Naso of a doorkeeper up before you; and secondly, How I am to get him down decorously in that ancient blue greatcoat, and get at my own proper text.

And first of the first. I thought it would do you young men- -the hope of the world-no harm to let your affections go out toward this dear, old-world specimen of homespun worth. And as to the second, I am going to make it my excuse for what is to come. One day soon after I knew him, when I thought he was in a soft, confidential mood, I said: "Jeems, what kind of weaver are you?" I'm in the fancical line, maister John," said he somewhat stiffly; "I like its leecence. So exit Jeems—impiger, iracundus, acer-torvus visu-placide quiescat!

Now, my dear friends, I am in the fancical line as well as Jeems, and in virtue of my leecence, I begin my exegetical remarks on the pursuit of truth. By the bye, I should have told Sir Henry that it was truth, not knowledge, I was to be after. Now all

knowledge should be true, but it isn't; much of what is called knowledge is very little worth even when true, and much of the best truth is not in a strict sense knowable,—rather it is felt and believed.

Exegetical, you know, is the grand and fashionable word now-a-days for explanatory; it means bringing out of a passage all that is in it, and nothing more. For my part, being in Jeems's line, I am not so particular as to the nothing more. We fancical men are much given to make somethings of nothings; indeed, the noble Italians call imagination and poetic fancy the little more; its very function is to embellish and intensify the actual and the common. Now you must not laugh at me, or it, when I announce the passage from which I mean to preach upon the pursuit of truth, and the possession of wisdom :

"On Tintock tap there is a Mist,
And in the Mist there is a Kist,
And in the Kist there is a Cap;
Tak' up the Cap and sup the drap,
And set the Cap on Tintock tap.'

And as to what Sir Henry 1 would call the context, we are saved all trouble, there being none, the passage being self-contained, and as destitute of relations as Melchisedec.

Tintock, you all know, or should know, is a big porphyritic hill in Lanarkshire, standing alone, and dominating like a king over the Upper Ward. Then we all understand what a mist is; and it is worth remembering that as it is more difficult to penetrate, to illuminate, and to see through mist than darkness, so it is easier to enlighten and overcome ignorance, than error, confusion, and mental mist. Then a kist is Scotch for chest, and a cap the same for cup, and drap for drop. Well, then, I draw out of these queer old lines

First, That to gain real knowledge, to get it at first-hand, you must go up the Hill Difficulty-some

1 This was read to Sir Henry W. Moncreiff's Young Men's Association, November 1862.

Tintock, something you see from afar—and you must climb; you must energize, as Sir William Hamilton and Dr. Chalmers said and did; you must turn your back upon the plain, and you must mainly go alone, and on your own legs. Two boys may start together on going up Tinto, and meet at the top; but the journeys are separate, each takes his own line.

Secondly, You start for your Tintock top with a given object, to get into the mist and get the drop, and you do this chiefly because you have the truthhunting instinct; you long to know what is hidden there, for there is a wild and urgent charm in the unknown; and you want to realize for yourself what others, it may have been ages ago, tell they have found there.

Thirdly, There is no road up; no omnibus to the top of Tinto; you must zigzag it in your own way, and as I have already said, most part of it alone.

Fourthly, This climbing, this exaltation, and buckling to of the mind, of itself does you good;1 it is capital exercise, and you find out many a thing by the way. Your lungs play freely; your mouth fills with the sweet waters of keen action; the hill tries your wind and mettle, supples and hardens your joints and limbs; quickens and rejoices, while it tests your heart.

Fifthly, You have many a fall, many a false step; you slip back, you tumble into a moss-hagg; you stumble over the baffling stones; you break your shins and lose your temper, and the finding of it makes you keep it better the next time; you get more patient, and yet more eager, and not unoften you come to a stand-still; run yourself up against, or to the edge of, some impossible precipice, some insoluble problem, and have to turn for your life; and you may find yourself over head in a treacherous wellee, whose soft inviting cushion of green has decoyed many a one before you.

"In this pursuit, whether we take or whether we lose our game, the chase is certainly of service."-Burke.

Sixthly, You are for ever mistaking the top; thinking you are at it, when, behold! there it is, as if farther off than ever, and you may have to humble yourself in a hidden valley before reascending; and so on you go, at times flinging yourself down on the elastic heather, stretched panting with your face to the sky, or gazing far away athwart the widening horizon. Seventhly, As you get up, you may see how the world below lessens and reveals itself, comes up to you as a whole, with its just proportions and relations; how small the village you live in looks, and the house in which you were born; how the plan of the place comes out; there is the quiet churchyard, and a lamb is nibbling at that infant's grave; there, close to the little church, your mother rests till the great day; and there far off you may trace the river winding through the plain, coming like human life, from darkness to darkness,-from its source in some wild, upland solitude to its eternity, the sea. But you have rested long enough, so, up and away! take the hill once again! Every effort is a victory and joy-new skill and power and relish-takes you farther from the world below, nearer the clouds and heavens; and you may note that the more you move up towards the pure blue depths of the sky-the more lucid and the more unsearchable-the farther off, the more withdrawn into their own clear infinity do they seem. Well, then, you get to the upper story, and you find it less difficult, less steep than lower down; often so plain and level that you can run off in an ecstasy to the crowning cairn, to the sacred mist-within whose cloudy shrine rests the unknown secret; some great truth of God and of your own soul; something that is not to be gotten for gold down on the plain, but may be taken here; something that no man can give or take away; something that you must work for and learn yourself, and which, once yours, is safe beyond the chances of time.

Eighthly, You enter that luminous cloud, stooping and as a little child-as, indeed, all the best king