regard me in the light of an intruder. An elderly tinker, the father of the bride, gray as a leafless thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat admiring a bit of spelter of about a pound weight. It was gold, he said, or, as he pronounced the word, "guild," which had been found in an old cairn, and was of immense value, "for it was peer guild, and that was the best o' guild;" but if I pleased, he would sell it to me, a very great bargain. I was engaged with some difficulty in declining the offer, when we were interrupted by the sounds of the bag-pipe. Giant Grimbo and Billy Breeches had succeeded in regaining their feet, and were seen staggering towards the cave. "Where's the whisky, Billy ?" inquired the proprietor of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes. "Whisky!" said Billy, "ask Grimbo." "Where's the whisky, Grimbo?" reiterated the tinker. Whisky!" replied Grimbo, "Whisky !" and yet again, after a pause and a hiccup, Whisky!" "Ye confounded blacks!" said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an age so advanced as his, "Have you drank it all? But take that, Grimbo, he added, planting a blow full on the side of the giant's head, which prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave. "And take that, Billy," he iterated, dealing such another blow to the shorter man, which sent him right athwart his prostrate comrade. And then, turning to me she remarked with perfect coolness, "That, master, I call smart hitting." "Honest lad," whispered one of the women immediately after, "it will be a reugh time wi' us here the nicht: you had just better be stepping your ways." I had already begun to think so without prompting; and so, taking my leave of the gipsies, I failed being, as I had proposed, one of the witnesses of the wedding. 66 66 There is a sort of grotesque humor in scenes of the kind described, that has charms for artists and authors of a particular class,--some of them men of broad sympathies and great genius; and hence, through their representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has come to be the conventional and ordinary one. And yet it is a sad enough mer riment, after all, that has for its subject a degradation so extreme, I never knew a gipsy that seemed to possess a moral sense,‚—a degree of Pariahism which has been reached by only one other class in the country, and that a small one,—the descendants of degraded females in our large towns. An education in Scotland, however secular in its character, always casts a certain amount of enlightenment on the conscience; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by honest industry, has a similar effect; but in the peculiar walks in which for generations there has been no education of any kind, or in which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to which the missionary or the moralist can appeal. It seems scarce possible for a man to know even a very little of these classes, without learning, in consequence, to respect honest labor, and even secular knowledge, as at least the second-best things, in their moral bearing and influence, that can exist among a people. CHAPTER XVIII "For such is the flaw or the depth of the plan BURNS DURING my period of convalescence, I amused myself in hewing for my uncles, from an original design, an ornate dialstone; and the dial-stone still exists, to show that my skill as a stone-cutter rose somewhat above the average of the profession in those parts of the country in which it ranks highest. Gradually as I recovered health and strength, little jobs came dropping in. I executed sculptured tablets in a style not common in the north of Scotland; introduced into the churchyards of the locality a better type of tombstone than had obtained in them before, save, mayhap, at a very early period; distanced all my competitors in the art of inscription-cutting; and at length found that, without exposing my weakened lungs to the rough tear and wear to which the ordinary stonecutter must subject himself, I could live. I deemed it an advantage, too, rather than the reverse, that my new branch of employment brought me not unfrequently for a few days into country districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with new fields of observation, and to open up new tracts of inquiry. Sometimes I spent half a week in a farm-house in the neighborhood of some country churchyard,-sometimes I lodged in a village,—oftener than once I sheltered beside some gentleman's seat, where the august shadow of lairdship lay heavy on society; and in this way I came to see and know a good deal of the Scottish people, in their many-colored aspects. of which otherwise I might have remained ignorant. At times, too, on some dusty cottage shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, what was not less welcome, got a curious tradition from the cottager; or there lay within the reach of an evening walk some interesting piece of antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit. A solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds usually are, in some pleasant spot, and surrounded by its groupes of ancient trees, formed a much more delightful scene of labor than a dusty work-shed, or some open area in a busy town; and altogether I found my new mode of life a quie : and happy one. Nor, with all its tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any great danger of falling asleep. There was scarce a locality in which new game might not be started, that, in the running down, kept the faculties in full play. Let me exemplify by describing the courses of inquiry, physical and metaphysical, which opened up to me when spending a few days, first in the burying-ground of Kirkmichael, and next in the churchyard of Nigg. I have elsewhere somewhat fancifully described the ruinous chapel and solitary grave-yard of Kirkmichael as lying on the sweep of a gentle declivity, within a few yards of a flat seabeach, so little exposed to the winds, that it would seem as if 66 ocean muffled its waves in approaching this field of the dead." And so the two vegetations,—that of the land and of the sea,―undisturbed by the surf, which on opener coasts prevents the growth of either along the upper littoral line, where the waves beat heaviest, here meet and mingle, each encroaching for a little way on the province of the other. And at meal-times, and when returning homewards in the evening along the shore, it furnished me with amusement enough to mark the character of the several plants of both floras that thus meet and cross each other, and the appearances which they assume when inhabiting each the other's province. On the side of the land, beds of thrift, with its gay flowers the seapinks, occupied green prominent cushions, that stood up like little islets amid the flowing sea, and were covered over by salt water during stream-tides to the depth of from eighteen inches to two feet. With these there occasionally mingled spikes of the sea-lavender; and now and then, though more rarely, a sea-aster, that might be seen raising above the calm surface its composite flowers, with their bright yellow staminal pods, and their pale purple petals. Far beyond, however, even the cushions of thrift, I could trace the fleshy, jointed stems of the glass-wort, rising out of the mud, but becoming diminutive and branchless as I followed them downwards, till, at depths where they must have been frequently swum over by the young coal-fish and the flounder, they appeared as mere fleshy spikes, scarce an inch in height, and then ceased. On the side of the sea it was the various fucoids that rose highest along the beach: the serrated fucus barely met the salt-wort; but the bladder-bearing fucus (fucus nodosus) mingled its brown fronds not unfrequently with the crimson flowers of the thrift, and the vesicular fucus (fucus vesiculosus) rose higher still, to enter into strange companionship with the sea-side plaintains and the common scurvy-grass. Green enteromorpha of two species-E. compressa and E. intestinalis —I also found abundant along the edges of the thrift-beds; and it struck me as curious at the time, that while most of the land-plants which had thus descended beyond the sealevel were of the high dicotyledonous division, the sea-weeds with which they mingled their leaves and seed-vessels were low in their standing,-fuci and enteromorpha,-plants at least not higher than their kindred cryptogamia, the lichens and mosses of the land. Far beyond, in the outer reaches of the bay, where land-plants never approached, there were meadows of a sub-marine vegetation, of (for the sea) a comparatively high character. Their numerous plants (zostera ma |