the ecstatic and jubilant anthems of cherubim and seraphim, celebrating the triumphs of the eternal Son, when by His omnipotent right hand, armed with winged and scorching lightnings, He drove forth the apostate angels, blasted and howling- "Down from the crystal battlements of heaven With sheer descent-" to the burning gulf below; or the scene is changed, and, lo! before his visioned eye passes the sublime panorama of the Creation. He stands in the presence of the Deity; he sees the mystic Dove brooding over the chaos of dark and troubled waters which cover the void and formless earth; he hears the Almighty fiat, "Let there be light," and he sees the conflicting and struggling elements separated, arranged, and organised by the word of His power into all the forms of order, utility, and beauty, so as to be most conducive to the glory of the Divine Architect and the use and accommodation of man. And now the Divine Urania will introduce him into the presence of the first human pair, fresh from the hand of God-glorious in beauty, and sinless in soul. He may roam through the groves of Paradise, and join with them in their morning and evening orisons -he may recline with them in the bowers of Eden on a couch of amaranth, and, while holding converse with angels, partake of the ambrosial fruits culled by the hand of the mother of all living. But this is, indeed, an inexhaustible subject, and one to which my limited powers can by no means render justice; yet it is truly consoling for working-men and women to know-ay, and to feel that on them, amidst all the toils, priva tions, and hardships incidental to their position in life, the gifts of God, of Nature, and of the Muses, are as impartially and profusely bestowed as on that portion of the community whose highest distinctions are too often found to consist only in the accidents of birth and fortune. "Sweet are the uses of adversity," sings the poet; and "sweet are the uses of poetry," says the working-man of cultivated intellect and refined feeling for to him there exists not a situation so irksome, a care so crushing, a trial so painful, a privation so severe, a suffering so intense, but he has felt in them all, that, next to the consolations of religion, those of Divine poesy are most potent in power to "Minister to a mind diseased, And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the charged bosom of that perilous stuff That weighs upon the heart." And amidst blasted hopes and wasted aspirations he may imbibe the very spirit of courage, patience, and resignation, by appropriating the sublime sentiments expressed by Campbell in those beautiful lines: "Be hushed, my dark spirit, for wisdom condemns When the faint and the feeble deplore; Be strong as the rock of the ocean that stems A thousand wild waves on the shore. Through the perils of chance and the scowl of disdain Yea, even the name I have worshipped in vain SKETCH OF A SCOTTISH ROADSIDE VILLAGE "SIXTY YEARS SINCE." LIVING much in the past, as persons in the wane of life generally do, who are of a reflective cast of mind, and who have been in the habit of treasuring up the experiences of the past for the purposes of improvement and comparison in the future, I will now, in accordance with this habit, unlock the treasures of memory, and give, it may be a faint and imperfect, but a true and characteristic Sketch of a Scottish Roadside Village Sixty Years Since. Most truly appropriate to my reminiscences of that time and place are the beautiful lines of Scotia's rustic bard: "Still o'er these scenes my memory wakes, And fondly broods with miser care; As streams their channels deeper wear." Our village is situated (for it still exists) on the highroad running between Glasgow and Edinburgh; and now, though looking back upon it through the long vista of years, it seems to me as if basking in summer sunshine-not the less bright that it lies so lovingly upon the lowly-thatched roofs of two long irregular rows of cottages standing on each side of the road, containing between four and five hundred inhabitants, and in almost every instance consisting of only a single apartment, fifteen or sixteen feet in width, and nearly square-two of these opening upon a common passage, leading quite through to the cottage garden behind, form what is called in Scotland " a but and ben." Entering in, you tread upon an unmade earthen floor worn into a hundred hollows. The ceiling above is constructed of rough-sawn boards, black with smoke; and there, in undisturbed security, venerable spiders hang their webs from "every coigne of vantage." You ascend by a ladder to a loft, where, if the family is large, the young men and boys sleep upon pallet beds, with the thatch for a canopy, surrounded with the lumber of disused hand-loom furniture. There is a heap of peats in one corner, and some bundles of bedstraw in another—a bunch of oat-straw, laid beneath a tick filled with chaff, being the only mattress known to the Scottish housewife of that period. In the house below, two large wooden boxes, with sliding or folding doors in front, with a space between for the inner door, held the beds of the family. The guidwife's clothes-press stood against the wall on one side of the house, and, the aumrie, or more modern dresser and rack, on the other; and in most houses a dark-faced eight-day clock served to mark the lapse of time to the industrious inhabitants. A chest, half-adozen coarse heavy chairs, a deal table, with two or three stools, completed the furniture of the Scottish. villager's home. But we have still to speak of the implements of female industry with which every house in the village was furnished. Of these the first place is due to the spinning-wheel; and O how many dear, dreamy, listen ing hours have I spent in the winter evenings, seated at the wheel-foot of an old woman, whose kindly heart has long ago been "mouldering in the silent dust," with my bare feet in dangerous proximity to the ashes on the hearth, and ever and anon shaking back the unkempt locks from my tearful eyes, that I might gaze up in her face while she, with a voice of wailing sweetness, sung the "Woes of Burd Helen," "Tifties Annie," or "The Flowers of the Forest!" It was from this national and time-honoured implement of woman's industry that the more elderly class of females drew their sole means of subsistence. The finer portions of the flax supplied the material for saleyarn, which was bought up by yarn merchants at appointed stations in every town and village; but now the use of machinery has entirely superseded the spinning-wheel, except in the rural districts, where the wives of farmers and peasants still use the wheel for working up flax into coarse fabrics for home wear. About this time, and long after, tambour work upon muslin formed the principal source of domestic employment for young women and girls, and in almost every house the tambour frame was set up and surrounded with eager faces and busy hands. This work for many years was amply remunerated; and an industrious girl could not only earn a comfortable living for herself, but also assist her parents with the younger portion of the family; and while the daughters plied the tambour needles, the mother or aunt was busy ca'in' the pirns-or, in English, winding quills for the weavers-for hand-loom weaving |