overpowered, and we began to think of escape. By this time a crowd of idle women and boys gathered round the school and were gaping in at every window, but the front door had been secured by Mr. Birch, as he anticipated an immediate evacuation, and abandonment. He was now in a worse plight than ever-he blustered, he raved, he stamped, and sent for a peace officer; and now came the tug of war. An expedient was proposed by Fairlie, which was to bolt through the postern and scale the garden wall. This was soon put in execution, and never did a forlorn hope act with such daring intrepidity. The passage to the garden was so blocked up that the stouter boys got clear without the possibility of poor Gabriel reaching one of them. However he remained with all the temper and philosophy he could muster, (which nature had indeed, sparingly bestowed on him,) and hastily paced to and fro in the half empty school, till the arrival of the constable. The constable was well known to us all. Mr. Dugal M'Gregor, a little burly black-visaged Highlander, who had "Grown proud and pursy by retail, Of brisk small beer and bottled ale." And we all knew that he would have most obsequiously obeyed the mandate of our reverend tutor, and remorselessly dragged us into captivity in the King's name, whose name becomes odious by being abused by every up-start jack, (himself a smuggler,) even of the rank of guager seizing an anker of gin. Mr. Dugal M'Gregor now knit his dark brows, and swore 'py the Got gif they didna tell him a' about the pretty ploy they had been airt and pairt the actors in he wad just shank them a'aff thegither to the tople.'* This threat delivered in apparently unfeigned Highland anger had a terrific effect on the wee Lowland tyros, and when one began to tell one part another was easily found to corroborate him. The upshot was that the names of Pate Plumtree, Jack Wildgrove, Tom Merrilees, Will Forrester, and Frank Fiddlewood were given as the perpetrators of the re-baptism of, and foul rebellion against, the worthy and respectable' Mr. Birch, as the delegate of the chief magistrate was Tolbooth, or jail. pleased to call him. We were glad, however, to have escaped in the meantime, the clutches of some unrelenting catchpoll, under the immediate superintendence of Mr. Dugal M'Gregor. The period at which this event took place was in the midsummer, a season the most propitious for truantism. In those northern regions the light and twilight continues till nearly ten at night, and this was rather unfavourable for our present adventure; for we had betaken ourselves to a field of wheat for safety in our retreat till night fall. Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind, and we dared not venture into the streets of the suburbs lest we should encounter some of Maister Dugal's scouts. The five boys, before-mentioned, had become sworn friends to one another; and there is a genuineness in youthful friendship, which has given a talismanic charm to the term, which, I fear, is expressive of an affinity far less disinterested in riper years than either the mutual benevolence of youth, or the amiable attachments of the softer sex. The hour of our separation drew nigh; but the arrangement for the next day had already been deliberated upon. It was an excursion to the ancient ruin of Crag Milior Castle, (situate about two miles to the south of the city,) by the way of Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, to drown the cares of the eventful day, thinking that time, which like distance throws a mellow smoothness over the landscape, would mollify the turmoils of the past in the mind of Gabriel Birch. But our shallow reasoning did not enable us to consider that his vexations arose from defeats and their attendant disgrace, things not easily countenanced without shame and resentment, so that the credit we were disposed to give him for forbearance was misplaced, as the reader will learn in the sequal. We then retired with the understanding of meeting by the next day's dawn. What now began to wring my mind was how I should account for my irregularity to my grandmother-how I should confront my aunt. I had not appeared at dinner-I had stopped out long beyond her prescribed hour, and I had rebelled against my tutor. I also had frightful cogitations on the score of Maister Dugal's minions to encounter, which brought the most foreign compunctions that ever visited my heart. I dreaded that my relations might have heard all, and trembled when I approached the gate that opened into a small garden of sweet-brier, violets, and honey-suckle, now wooing the night breeze with their rich odour. This was in front of the house. I opened it cautiously, I perceived the lights had been extinguished, as if done to punish me. I now tried the latch of the house door-all was fast. I knocked gently-no answer, all was hushed. I knocked louder, and I began to feel a petty resentment--I conceived myself neglected, and increased my knock, till it became too troublesome for the inmates to suffer it any longer. At length my aunt came to the window en deshabille, and said- "Who is there at sic untimeous time o' night?" 'It is I :' "You must have mistaken the door," said she"Oh? my dear Aunt Ellenor, how can you say so? -let me in-I have been bad-but-." She made no reply. While I waited, doubtful of my reception, I fairly concluded that Birch must have been there. There is something in reclaiming youth from their first aberrations which excites a generous sympathy from every mind imbued with the feelings of humanity. My aunt descended to the door and let me in silently, and not a word further was exchanged. I was therefore doomed to remain in suspense, and could not learn whether the dominie's scouts had been there or not. I was left to grope my way to bed supperless. I lay down; but it proved a bed of thorns -not from my conduct towards Birch; but from the apparent misunderstanding created with my friends. I tossed about in restlesness till. I heard in the silent morning the reveillie beat on the distant four o'clock drum in the Castle, and re-echoed by that of the Town guard, an ancient practice still kept up in many of the royal burghs of Scotland. It was now dawn; and in a short time the sun was to be abroad in all his splendour. The moment approached that we were to begin our peregrinations for the day; and I had just begun to snooze when a handful of peas came pattering on the panes of my chamber window to warn me that my companions were * prepared. I roused instanter-" donned my clothes," joined my friends and in about twenty minutes we began to ascend the eastern limb of Salisbury Crags, a high ridge of granite, which scowls in rugged majesty over the ancient metropolis of Scotland. From this ridge, in a southerly direction, an inclined plain of rich green sward forms one side of a natural amphitheatre, or large valley, and a lesser line of crags forms the other, rising upwards till terminated by the base of Arthur's Seat, a conical mountain about 814 feet above the level of the sea. We now stood opposite to it on the identical spot where the Great Unknown was seen to stand before he brought to light the Heart of Midlothian. He was then drawing his inspiration from nature, and it is not at all improbable that here he formed the character and adopted the name of Dumbiedikes from a place so called that was then beneath his eye. We now looked around with wonder and delight, but what was the view then to what it now is? It could bear no comparison; yet even then it might outvie any other scene of the kind in Europe. The tourist will admit that the view from Cooper's Hill, near Windsor, is too extensive, and its magnificent objects too distant and indistinct to excite such grand sensations, as that which we now beheld. I have seen London, Venice, Rome, Florence, and other great cities in Europe, but none of them ever effaced the beauty and grandeur of the panorama that lay beneath and around us. If the greatest bard of modern times had described this scene with his graphic pen, as he has those of other countries his. genius would have made it immortal, and Scotland would have felt grateful for what perhaps she had been deprived of by the fastidious self-sufficiency of one of her children.* But, as has been justly observed of the poet Burns, without his faults and eccentricities he would not have been Burns. Perhaps without the harsh critique, on the first essay of the author of Harold, he would not have been the great Byron. Digression serves as a pause in the entertainment, till the exhausted course is superseded by another, which other, the reader consenting, we shall reserve to the next chapter. * Edin. Rev. of Poems by Lord Byron. A Minor. Miscellaneous. "There is a time to laugh and a time to weep."-SOL. Law. Mr. Jeremy Bentham considers litigation a great evil, and deems it the height of cruelty to load a law-suit, which is one evil, with taxation, which is another. It would be quite as fair, he thinks, to tax a man for being ill, by enacting that no physician should write a prescription without a stamp. Mr. Pitt, on the contrary, considered a law-suit a luxury! and held that, like other luxuries, it ought to be taxed. "Westminster Hall," said he is as open to any man as the London Tavern;" to which Sheridan replied, "he that entered either without money, would meet with a very scurvy reception." Some will say that the heavy expences of law prevent the frequency of law-suits, but the practice does not confirm the theory. Others will say that they originate from men of obstinate and quarrelsome dispositions, and that such ought to suffer for their folly. There would be something in this, provided it were not necessary for a wise man to take a shield, when a fool has taken a sword. Lawsuits, indeed, do generally originate with the obstinate and the ignorant, but they do not end with them; and that lawyer was right who left all his money to the support of an asylum for fools and lunatics, saying, that from such he got it, and to such he would bequeath it. Died, at Harlaxton, near Grantham, Mr. Nicholas Hardy, aged 85, formerly and for many years a faithful servant in Lord Brownlow's family. This man's honesty was equalled only by his eccentricity; he possessed considerable property, some of which is in Grantham Canal-Shares, and which he has left subject to the payment of a guinea each to the ringers and singers of Harlaxton, to ring and sing on the anniversary of his funcral, so long as a drop of water remains in the canal. He also gave a guinea each to several distant relations, with directions to his executor not to pay that sum to such of them as were seen to cry at his funeral; with several other equally singular bequests. Death no Respecter of Persons.--If we read the history of disorders, we are astonished that men live ; if of curses, we are still more astonished that they die. But death is the only sovereign whom no partiality can warp, and no price corrupt. He neither spares the hero, his purveyor by wholesale; nor the physician, |