steps of real progress in an unripe age. But woe, woe to them who make the Church only a conscious and confessed means of access to the world! For me, I feel I am unworthy, and can but grope and feel after such a measure of grace as may fit me—such a measure of grace as, with God's blessing, I may one day find, as you have found it."

The family at length left for the Continent, and Parlane, about the beginning of autumn, came back to Edinburgh. It was the dull season, and not an easy matter to obtain work. He waited; he wrote home; his father did not reply. If he heard at all, it was the merest scrap from his poor mother, whose heart, it seemed to him, was breaking, brooding over the image of her strayed child, as a bird will haunt its robbed nest. Parlane withdrew himself from all companionship, till at length even I felt my visits to be intrusions. His cash ran short; he scorned to borrow; and, though his landlady, with the ready resource of true kindness which one often finds in quiet reserved women, would lessen the amount of his bills before presenting them, and encourage him to eat of the unusual and tempting delicacies she took upon herself on various pretexts to offer, yet he pined, and sank, became quite abstracted, would fall down on his knees by bed or sofa, and remain in that position for hours and hours. Books, of old so full of attraction, were now unopened; the little bookcase locked up; the only remaining old habit being his reading of a chapter from the Bible in the morning, and a passage from some religious treatise at night. But the mind was evidently breaking down, the will was spinning to its fall like a spent wheel. The end of it all was, that he was conveyed to Morningside Asylum, where life for a time crept on through utter unconsciousness.

These papers which follow are his. He intrusted me with them and some others the last time I saw him, which was during a short lucid interval he had, when he sent for me. But what a humbling picture it was! The promising student, who familiarly knew Fichte and Hegel as well as

Ovid and Horace, and had Dante as well as Homer by heart, and echoes of whose poems rung in the ears of his few privileged companions, now sat with head helplessly bent down, the long yellow locks shaved close off, the once clear blue eye vacant and to all appearance yet farther withdrawn under the protruding cliffy brows. He shook hands absently, sat down, and his head fell on his breast. He spoke not a word till I expressed my pleasure at his betterness, when the familiar tones seemed to awaken him a little; and he replied, with the calm look and the slow measuredness of tone which I had heard him so often use to others, that he was happy and comfortable, and deserved no better treatment than he got. He raised his eyes towards me; it was as though something of the friendly boy Parlane struggled from the very furthest nook of the soul to express itself. He kindled up; but there was something strangely weird in the way he joked about our college companions, and the almost ghastly rattle of his laugh as he recited the innocent tricks he had tried on his keeper since he had recovered. Keys clinked just then, and a face peeped in, signifying that "time was up." He gave me the papers somewhat hurriedly and with a strange smile-a smile like March sunlight upon ice,-saying I might keep them for his sake and “auld lang syne;" and he moved shufflingly along the passage as the porter opened the door to let me out.*

* Often, often in reading over Parlane's Mss. have I been reminded of his denunciations of what he called the "lath-and-plaster" and the "happy-go-lucky" styles of story-writing. The one was that in which common peasants are made to talk exactly like princes or professors; and the other that which produced works of genuine fiction, inasmuch as in them all truth and fact were sacrificed to some shadow of a poetic justice, which had no existence save in the minds of the producers. I remember on one occasion, when a few of us were met together, a fellow student, who was famous for sentimental verses in the Pope couplet, monopolised the ears of all by descanting on a story he had written or was about to write. Parlane listened for a time with an evident inclination to laugh, then suddenly assuming the gravest expression, interrupted our friend by inquiring whether he had ever studied the philosophy of old shoes, and ended by threatening to lecture for an hour upon his slippers,

I remember, as though it were yesterday, standing by his newly-made grave, near my home and only a few miles from his. The earth was white with the snow of February, and a cold sun shot dreary rays through the elms near-by, and through the bare black firs which lined the churchyard. Next to his resting-place was one-now some five years old -which had at its head a tombstone on which was rudely cut, "In memory of Annie, youngest daughter of John and Mary Shaw, of Caldcotts, in this parish;" and with that strange garrulity which among the country Scotch finds verge even on tombstones, there was added at the foot, died of the fever which ravaged this parish in 18—, in her sixteenth year. Old in faith of her Saviour, she departed

this life in perfect peace."

"She

I stood between the tombs of Love and Friendship. The first had robbed me of an object, and the latter had restored me to myself and given me one. I walked away solitary, the dull muffled sound of the earth falling following me, and somehow making me strangely dizzy.

And I could not help reflecting as I went, while the cold east-wind piped and whistled through palings and hedges, on the cruelty of short-sighted human kindness. The old sheep-farmer, generous beyond his peers in most things, had set his heart on seeing his boy a dissenting minister, and the image had become an idol to him who so hated idolatry. He had become puffed-up with pictures of his son holding a high place in the "body ;" and in his fatherly yet unfatherly persistency, had driven him to madness, and her who bore. him into something other than the sweet placid old woman she might have been. The shining idol had fallen, crushing the hearts of the worshippers.

whose seams were now protrusively gaping, like a drunkard's mouth, if lengthened monologue was to be tolerated. This grave good-natured hint had the desired effect, and we got on very happily thereafter. How far Parlane is himself a model of story-writing, my readers themselves must judge.

I followed Alec Parlane's example in the very point which my parents had been so ready to caution me against; but poor Alec's end was a warning which made my father bear with my aberrations more patiently than he would otherwise have done. I never entered the Scotch Secession Church, and have no thoughts now of doing so. For years I have wrought as a publisher's hack in the great Babel, unknown and not seeking to be known, cheerful and contented. When others speak of wife and children, and my friend So-and-so, my thoughts involuntarily turn to a little churchyard among the mountains, where are two familiar graves; and sometimes, no doubt, in midst of lively talk and laughter, I look puzzlingly grave; but I can't tell my story to every body.

I.

A SISTER'S SACRIFICE.

"The good die first."-Wordsworth.

CHAPTER I.

SAM'S MISHAP.

"O SAM, Sam, see whar Broonie is!"

This exclamation came from a trim, dark-complexioned young woman, in a striped short gown and wincey petticoat, who had evidently been toiling at the washtub, for the perspiration stood on her round comely face, and her arms, plump but work-like, were bare to the elbows and wet. She carried a small round basket, whose snowy contents gave good evidence of clever capable hands. To the left of the speaker was a patch of grass in the middle of a paddock, but greener and thicker than the rest, and with rare tufts of white daisies, and a whin-bush or two, which country laundresses delight in, as they are feigned to impart choice scents to their linen. The "green" was enclosed by a rough paling, on which bunches of withered sea-weed, mixed here and there with strips of short coarse wool, dryly rattled in the breeze, and already a number of the whitest square and triangular patches, spread out, glistened in the bright forenoon sun. The peccant "Broonie"-a fine yellow-brown Ayrshire quey-had found her way into the patch through a gap which a recent gale had made, and was now complacently and leisurely rubbing her shoulder on a clothes-pole, while now and