drafted out of Lord Keith's fleet to supply the lack of artillery men in the army of Sir Ralph Abercromby; had a share in the dangers and glory of the landing in Egypt; and fought in the battle of the 13th March, and in that which deprived our country of one of her most popular generals. He served, too, at the siege of Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in procuring his discharge during the short peace of 1802, he returned home with a small sum of hardly-earned prize money, heartily sick of war and bloodshed. I was asked, not long ago, by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my uncle had ever told me that their gun was the first landed in Egypt, and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapidity unsurpassed, along the line they poured out in thick succession its iron discharges upon the enemy. I had to reply in the negative. All my uncle's narratives were narratives of what he had seen-not of what he had done; and, when perusing, late in life, one of his favorite works-" Dr. Keith's Signs of the Times"-he came to the chapter in which that excellent writer describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured out on the sea, and in which the waters "became as the blood of a dead man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head in reverence as he remarked, "Prophecy, I find, gives to all our glories but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy, however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences; and on the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when Napoleon threatened invasion from Brest to Boulege, at once shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency of speech; but his narratives of what he had seen were singularly truthful and graphic; and his descriptions of foreign plants and animals, and of the aspect of the distant regis which he had visited, had all the careful minuteness of those of a Dampier. He had a decided turn for natural history.

My collection contains a murex, not unfrequent in the Mediterranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pocket; and the first ammonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he brought home with him from one of the liasic deposits of England.

Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at my uncles' with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly with my two sisters, to be catechised, first on the Shorter Catechism, and then on the Mother's Catechism of Willison. On Willison my uncles always cross-examined us, to make sure that we understood the short and simple questions; but, apparently regarding the questions of the Shorter Catechism as seed sown for a future day, they were content with having them well fixed in our memories. There was a Sabbath class taught in the parish church at the time by one of the elders; but Sabbath schools my uncles regarded as merely compensatory institutions, highly creditable to the teachers, but very discreditable indeed to the parents and relatives of the taught; and so they of course never thought of sending us there. Later in the evening, after a short twilight walk, for which the sedentary occupation of my Uncle James formed an apology, but in which my Uncle Alexander always shared, and which usually led them into solitary woods, or along an unfrequented sea-shore, some of the old divines were read; and I used to take my place in the circle, though, I am afraid, not to very much advantage. I occasionally caught a fact, or had my attention arrested for a moment by a simile or metaphor; but the trains of close argument, and the passages of dreary "application," were always lost.

CHAPTER III.

"At Wallace name what Scottish blood
But boils up in a spring-tide flood!
Oft have our fearless fathers strode

By Wallace side,

Still pressing onward, red wat shod,
Or glorious died."

Burns.

I FIRST became thoroughly a Scot some time in my tenth year; and the consciousness of country has remained tolerably strong within me ever since. My Uncle James had procured for me from a neighbor the loan of a common stall-edition of Blind Harry's "Wallace," as modernized by Hamilton; but after reading the first chapter,-a piece of dull genealogy, broken into very rude rhyme,-I tossed the volume aside as uninteresting; and only resumed it at the request of my uncle, who urged that, simply for his amusement and gratification, I should read some three or four chapters more. Accordingly, the three or four chapters more I did read ;-I read "how Wallace killed young Selbie the Constable's son;" "how Wallace fished in Irvine Water;" and "how Wallace killed the Churl with his own staff in Ayr ;" and then Uncle James told me, in the quiet way in which he used to make a joke tell, that the book seemed to be rather a rough sort of production, filled with accounts of quarrels and bloodshed, and that I might read no more of it unless I felt inclined. But I now did feel inclined very strongly, and read on with increasing astonishment and

delight. I was intoxicated with the fiery narratives of the blind minstrel,—with his fierce breathings of hot, intolerant patriotism, and his stories of astonishing prowess; and, glorying in being a Scot, and the countryman of Wallace and the Graham, I longed for a war with the Southron, that the wrongs and sufferings of these noble heroes might yet be avenged. All I had previously heard and read of the marvels of foreign parts, or the glories of modern battles, seemed tame and commonplace compared with the incidents in the life of Wallace and I never after vexed my mother by wishing myself big enough to be a sailor. My Uncle Sandy, who had some taste for the refinements of poetry, would fain have led me on from the exploits of Wallace to the "Life of the Bruce," which, in the form of a not very vigorous imitation of Dryden's "Virgil," by one Harvey, was bound up in the same volume, and which my uncle deemed the better-written life of the two. And so far as the mere amenities of style were concerned, he was, I dare say, right. But I could not agree with him. Harvey was by much too fine and too learned for me; and it was not until some years after, when I was fortunate enough to pick up one of the later editions of Barbour's "Bruce," that the Hero-King of Scotland assumed his right place in my mind beside its Hero-Guardian. There are stages of development in the immature youth of individuals, that seem to correspond with stages of development in the immature youth of nations; and the recollections of this early time enable me, in some measure, to understand how it was that, for hundreds of years, Blind Harry's "Wallace," with its rude and naked narrative, and its exaggerated incident, should have been, according to Lord Hailes, the Bible of the Scotch people.

I quitted the dame's school at the end of the first twelvemonth, after mastering that grand acquirement of my life,the art of holding converse with books; and was transferred straightforth to the grammar school of the parish, at which there attended at the time about a hundred and twenty boys, with a class of about thirty individuals more, much looked down upon by the others, and not deemed greatly worth the

counting, seeing that it consisted of only lassies. And here, too, the early individual development seems nicely correspondent with an early national one. In his depreciatory estimate of contemporary woman, the boy is always a true savage. The old parish school of the place had been nobly situated in a snug corner, between the parish churchyard and a thick wood; and from the interesting centre which it formed, the boys, when tired of making dragon-horses of the erect head-stones, or of leaping along the flat-laid memorials, from end to end of the graveyard, "without touching grass," could repair to the taller trees, and rise in the world by climbing among them. As, however, they used to encroach, on these latter occasions, upon the laird's pleasure-grounds, the school had been removed ere my time to the sea-shore; where, though there were neither tombstones nor trees, there were some balancing advantages, of a kind which, perhaps, only boys of the old school could. have adequately appreciated. As the school-windows fronted the opening of the Frith, not a vessel could enter the harbor that we did not see; and, improving through our opportunities, there was perhaps no educational institution in the kingdom in which all sorts of barks and carvels, from the fishing yawl to the frigate, could be more correctly drawn on the slate, or where any defect in bulk or rigging, in some faulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and unsparingly criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork at the time, had a killing-place not thirty yards from the school-door, where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the general good in a single day; and it was a great matter to hear, at occasional intervals, the roar of death outside rising high over the general murmur within; or to be told by some comrade, returned from his five minutes' leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three blows of the hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, too, to know, from our signal opportunities of observation, not only a good deal about pig anatomy,-especially about the detached