It was ing-piece, it were made to turn round corners. Angus's; and in a minute and a half you see himself follow up the discovery its tip has just been making, namely, that the path is "all before him where to choose." Hear the indescribable churm aud chirrup of his everlasting whistle; and now, behold the man! Beneath the true Skye or Moidart bonnet of the aboriginal shape you will see a set of features that indicate uncommon placidity, with no little shrewdness. The eye-balls are deep sunk and lustreless; but is there one can tell how they became so? For our part, we never had the heart to fathom the mystery which, in our apprehension, has ever clung around this Homer of the nineteenth century. You will remark, that Angus is substantially and comfortably attired in the blue plaiding which, more than holiday tartan, is the material of Highland costume, let the Celtic Society do what they will. Yet Angus is a mendicant,—we cannot bring ourselves to say a beggar, for though he will intermit his whistle if you put a penny in his palm, there lives not the man who ever was asked for alms by this Æolian wanderer. He feels that the appeal of his plaintive breath is all that is required, and is conscious that if he has received from the midnight passengers sums that have enabled him to hoard up a little reserve to meet asthma or other calamities, he has furnished them with an equivalent in recalling to the Highlander the music and the associations dependent upon it of his native glens and mountains; to the civic Lowlander, the recollection of nights when he before has heard him in his lonely rounds, which, with light hearts and heads, loaded stomachs, and fascinating companions, can never return; and to the student of character, and the hermit of society, a picture unique if not bold, curious if not unparalleled. It is now a dozen years since Angus went to his last account. There was something in the simplicity of his character and demeanour which protected him from insult. Those who gave him nothing at least passed him by with commiseration. Even the drunken cottonspinner or bedaised carter, the lushy butcher and rolled up baker, seemed to regard him as decidedly not a belligerent, but entitled to all the privileges of a neutral, and having a right to pilot his way through the streets, however they might deem their breadth insufficient for others besides themselves, and think that they alone should "keep the cantle o' the causey" when half-seas over.— 66 Eh!-ho! aye, de-deevil tak' me, Geordie, if there's no Angus, wh-whi-wifflin' awa' as weel as if his breath wou'd ne'er gang dune! Ha'e ye sic a thing as a penny left to gi'e the body? 'Od m-man (d—n the gutter!) I min' o' him whiffling the night ye were married, an' that's no yestreen. Here, Angus, gi'e us 'Todlin' but and toddlin' b-be-ben.'" One might listen to an oration like this addressed to Angus long before he could hear it himself; but as for the concluding request, he could only give one of his quiet smiles in reply to it, for regular tune or repetition of precisely what he had before whistled was out of the question with Angus. It was from inspiration, not from memory, that he whistled, and in this he was honourably distinguished from the herd of ballad-singers and street fiddlers. An historical investigation into his musings would be a contribution to the science of mind; a series of his reminiscenses, a collection of street anecdotes and convivial sketches of unrivalled interest. Has he not whistled when Prince's-Street was the centre of good eating and drinking, and perambulated when Jamie Hamilton of Garthamlock limped his laughing way through streets made vocal by his tipsy cheers? Ah! could he tell the fortunes and the fate of the hundreds who have listened to his breathing lays, what a picture of mutation he could furnish.* * "Ant,"-Original Volume. 1 414 CHAPTER XV. OUR ANCESTORS. "I'll view the manners of the town, THE past years of the nineteenth century have witnessed greater mutations in the aspect of social manners than any equal period in the history of our country. The world has become more worldly. There is more of dissipation, and less of enjoyment. Pleasure has expanded into a broader and a shallower stream, and has forsaken many of those deep and quiet channels, where it formerly flowed so sweetly through the bosom of domestic life. Society has acquired a more enlightened and elegant tone, but it has lost many of its strong local peculiarities, its home-bred feelings,-its honest fireside delights. The traditionary customs of golden-hearted antiquity, have also altogether passed away. They comported with the shadowy hall, the great oaken gallery, and the tapestried parlour; but are unfitted to the light showy saloons and gay drawing-rooms of modern times. Glasgow society, till the period when commerce brought wealth to the city, had no distinctive features. The same abject ignorance and superstition which characterised small districts, were not inseparate from large towns; and so late as the 12th of March, 1698, the magistrates of our city granted an allowance to the jailor for keeping warlocks and witches imprisoned in the tolbooth, by order of the lords commissioners of justiciary. The Union, in 1707, opened to Scotland the trade to the English colonies; but, betwixt want of capital, and the national jealousy of the English, the merchants of Scotland were as yet excluded, in a great measure, from the exercise of the privileges which that memorable treaty conferred on them. Glasgow lay upon the wrong side of the island for participating in the east country or continental trade, by which the trifling commerce as yet produced in Scotland chiefly supported itself. Yet, though she then gave small promise of the commercial eminence to which she has now attained, Glasgow, as the principal central town of the western district of Scotland, was a place of considerable rank and importance. broad and brimming Clyde, which flows so near its walls, gave the means of an inland navigation of some import The |