Age hath not quell'd his strength, nor quench'd desire Ah! this must sure be thee! All hail my honored Sire! Alas! thy latest voyage draws near a close, For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky; Resound the shores, harsh screams the rending sail, Three days the tempest raged; on Scotia's shore Of thee, my Sire, what mortal tongue can tell! Strange baseless tales of hope thy friends deceived; At length, when deeper, darker waxed the gloom, That bids the accepted soul its robes of joy assume." I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's school, where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spelling a word aloud, which is not often,—for I find the process a very perilous one, the aa's and ee's, and uhs and vaus, return upon me, and I have to translate them with no little hesitation, as I go along, into the more modish sounds. A knowledge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by studying the sign-posts of the place,-rare works of art, that excited my utmost admiration, with jugs, and glasses, and bottles, and ships, and loaves of bread upon them, all of which could, as the artists had intended, be actually recognized. During my sixth year I spelt my way, under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the Bible class; but all the while the process of acquiring learning had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended; when at once my mind awoke to the meaning of the most delightful of all narratives,—the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books; and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner on the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve ;-the other Scripture stories followed,-in especial, the story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliah, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, too, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works. Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances the useful-knowledge books had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening intellect of the "youthhood;" and so, from my rudimental books,-books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind,-I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admi rably for Ittle folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which, in the only true translation extant,-for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be--I found in the house of a neighbor. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early an age, true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child's book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous wood-cuts, each of which occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other side. And such delightful prints as they were! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as "Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts, Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire, Sharp-knee'd, sharp-elbow'd, and lean-ancled too, With long and ghastly shanks,-forms which, once seen, In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. t was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four volumes,-Mrs. Ratcliff's "Mysteries of Udolpho," was represented by only the earlier two. mall as the collection was, it contained some rare books, -autong the rest, a curious little volume, entitled "The Miracles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the "Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion," a work interesting from the circumstance that— though it bore another name on its title-page-it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style. The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent the best years of his life as a slave in MoIt had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy, Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelations, with the title page away, and blind Jameson's volume on the Hierarchy, with first editions of Naphtali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind Let Loose. But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyages were my especial favorites. I perused with avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts and fight battles. rocco. I have already made mention of my two maternal uncles; and referred, at least incidentally, to their mother, as the friend and relative of my father's aged cousins, and, like her, a greatgrand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's youngest daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated Highland outlaw, from the color of his hair, as Roy, or the red. Donald Roy was the best club-player in the district; and as King James's "Book of Sports" was not deemed a very bad book in the semi-Celtic parish of Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the district, by events that approximated in character to the supernatural; and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of the religious character, which in the South of Scotland belongs to the first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the persecution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatural was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in whom it was exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams; and, standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into the world of spirits, and had at times their strange glimpses of the distant and the future. To the north of the Grampians, as if born out of due season, these seers pertain to a later age. They flourished chiefly in the early part of the last century; for it is a not uninstructive fact, that in the religious history of Scotland, the eighteenth century of the Highland and semi-Highland districts of the north corresponds in many of its traits to the seventeenth century of the Saxon-peopled districts of the south; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old recollections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory of the Scottish people. Living, too, in an age in which, like the Covenanters of a former century, the Highlander still retained his weapons, and knew how to use them, |