yourself to convert me, I'll brak your face;" and I have known another of them remark, with a patronizing air, that "kirks were nae very bad things, after a';" that he "aye liked to be in a kirk, for the sake of decency, once a twelvemonth;" and that, as he "hadna been kirked for the last ten months, he was just only waiting for a rainy Sabbath to lay in his stock o' divinity for the year." Our new lodger, aware how little any interference with the religious concerns of others was tolerated in the place, seemed unable for some time to muster up resolution enough to broach in the family his favorite subject. He retired every night, before going to bed, to his closet, the blue vault, with all its stars, often the only closet of the devout lodger in a south-country cottage; but I saw that each evening, ere he went out, he used to look uneasily at the landlord and me, as if there lay some weight on his mind regarding us, of which he was afraid to rid himself, and which yet rendered him very uncomfortable. "Well, John," I asked one evening, speaking direct, to his evident embarrassment; "what is it?" John looked at old William the landlord, and then at me. "Did we not think it right," he said, "that there should be evening worship in the family?" Old William had not idea enough for conversation: he either signified acquiescence in whatever was said that pleased him, by an ever-recurring ay, ay, ay; or he grumbled out his dissent in a few explosive sounds, that conveyed his meaning rather in their character as tones than as vocables. But there now mingled with the ordinary explosions the distinct enunciation, given with, for him, unwonted emphasis, that he "wasna for that." I struck in, however, on the other side, and appealed to Peggy. "I was sure," I said, "that Mrs. Russel would see the propriety of John's proposal." And Mrs. Russel, as most women would have done in the circumstances, unless, indeed, very bad ones, did see the propriety of it; and from that evening forward the cottage had its family worship. John's prayers were always very earnest and excellent, but sometimes just a little too long; and old William, who, I fear, did not greatly profit by them, used not unfrequently to fall asleep on

his knees. But though he sometimes stole to his bed when John chanced to be a little later in taking the book than usual, and got into a profound slumber ere the prayer began, he deferred to the majority, and gave us no active opposition. He was not a vicious man: his intellect had slept through life, and he had as little religion as an old horse or dog; but he was quiet and honest, and, to the measure of his failing ability, a faithful worker in his humble employments. His religious training, like that of his brother villagers, seemed to have been sadly neglected. Had he gone to the parish church on Sunday, he would have heard a respectable moral essay read from the pulpit, and would, of course, have slept under it; but William, like most of his neighbors, preferred sleeping out the day at home, and never did go to the church; and as certainly as he went not to the teacher of religion, the teacher of religion never came to him. During the ten months which I spent in the neighborhood of Niddry Mill, I saw neither minister nor missionary. But if the village furnished no advantageous ground on which to fight the battle of religious Establishments,-seeing that the Establishment was of no manner of use there,—it furnished ground quite as unsuitable for the class of Voluntaries who hold that the supply of relig ious instruction should, as in the case of all other commodities, be regulated by the demand. Demand and supply were admirably well balanced in the village of Niddry: there was no religious instruction, and no wish or desire for it.

The masons at Niddry House were paid fortnightly, on a Saturday night. Wages were high,—we received two pounds eight shillings for our two weeks' work; but scarce half-a-dozen in the squad could claim at settlement the full tale, as the Monday and Tuesday after pay-night were usually blank days, devoted by two-thirds of the whole to drinking and debauchery. Not often has wages been more sadly misspent than by my poor work-fellows at Niddry, during this period of abundant and largely-remunerated employment. On receiving their money, they set straightway off for Edinburgh, in parties of threes and fours; and until the evening of the following Mon

day or Tuesday I saw no more of them. They would then come dropping in, pale, dirty, disconsolate-looking,—almost always in the re-actionary state of unhappiness which succeeds intoxication-(they themselves used to term it "the horrors") —and with their nervous system so shaken, that rarely until a day or two after did they recover their ordinary working ability. Narratives of their adventures, however, would then begin to circulate through the squad,-adventures commonly of the "Tom and Jerry" type; and always, the more extravagant they were, the more was the admiration which they excited. On one occasion, I remember (for it was much spoken about as a manifestation of high spirit) that three of them, hiring a coach, drove out on the Sunday to visit Roslin and Hawthornden, and in this way spent their six pounds so much in the style of gentlemen, that they were able to get back to the mallet without a farthing on the evening of Monday. And as they were at work on Tuesday in consequence, they succeeded, as they said, in saving the wages of a day usually lost, just by doing the thing so genteely. Edinburgh had in those times a not very efficient police, and, in some of its less reputable localities, must have been dangerous. Burke found its West Port a fitting scene for his horrid trade a good many years after; and from the stories of some of our bolder spirits, which, though mayhap exaggerated, had evidently their nucleus of truth, there was not a little of the violent and the lawless perpetrated in its viler haunts during the years of the speculation mania. Four of our masons found, one Saturday evening, a country lad bound hand and foot on the floor of a dark inner room in one of the dens of the High Street; and such was the state of exhaustion to which he was reduced, mainly through the compression of an old apron wrapped tightly round his face, that though they set him loose, it was some time ere he could muster strength enough to crawl away. He had been robbed by a bevy of women whom he had been foolish enough to treat; and on threatening to call in the watchman, they had fallen upon a way of keeping him quiet, which, save for the interference of my wild fellow-workmen,

would soon have rendered him permanently so. was but one of many stories of the kind.

And such

There was of course a considerable diversity of talent and acquirement, among my more reckless associates at the work; and it was curious enough to mark their very various views regarding what constituted spirit or the want of it. One weak lad used to tell us about a singularly spirited brother apprentice of his, who not only drank, kept loose company, and played all sorts of very mischievous practical jokes, but even occasionally stole out of warehouses; which was of course a very dauntless thing, seeing that it brought him within wind of the gallows; whereas another of our wild workmen,—a man of sense and intelligence,-not unfrequently cut short the narratives of the weaker brother, by characterizing his spirited apprentice as a mean, graceless scamp, who, had he got his deservings, would have been hung like a dog. I found that the intelligence which results from a fair school education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against intemperance or licentiousness; but it did form a not ineffectual protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices,—such as theft, and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and dishonesty. Of course, exceptional cases occur in all grades of society: there have been accomplished ladies of wealth and rank who have indulged in a propensity for stealing out of drapers' shops, and gentlemen of birth and education who could not be trusted in a library or a bookseller's back-room; and what sometimes occurs in the higher walks must be occasionally exemplified in the lower also; but, judging from what I have seen, I must hold it as a general rule, that a good intellectual education is a not inefficient protection against the meaner felonies, though not in any degree against the "pleasant vices." The only adequate protection against both equally is the sort of education which my friend John Wilson the laborer exemplified, a kind of education not often acquired in schools,

and not much more frequently possessed by schoolmasters than by any other class of professional men.

The most remarkable man in our party was a young fellow of three-and-twenty, at least as much a blackguard as any of his companions, but possessed of great strength of character and intellect, and, with all his wildness, marked by very noble traits. He was a strongly and not inelegantly formed man, of about six feet,—dark complexioned, and of a sullen cast of countenance, which, however, though he could, I doubt not, become quite as formidable as he looked, concealed in his ordinary moods much placidity of temper, and a rich vein of humor. Charles was the recognized hero of the squad; but he differed considerably from the men who admired him most. Burns tells us that he "often courted the acquaintance of the part of mankind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards ;" and that, “though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest virtues,-magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty." I cannot say with the poet that I ever courted the acquaintance of blackguards; but though the laboring man may select his friends, he cannot choose his workfellows; and so I have not unfrequently come in contact with blackguards, and have had opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of the class has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices real; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callousness of feeling, and meanness of spirit, lying concealed beneath. In this poor fellow, however, I certainly did find a sample of the noble variety of the genus. Poor Charles did too decidedly belong to it. He it was that projected the Sunday party to Roslin; and he it was that, pressing his way into the recesses of a disreputable house in the High Street, found the fast-bound wight choaking in an apron, and, unloosing the cords, let him go. No man of the party squandered his gains more recklessly than Charles, or had looser no