profession of religion, were honest in their dealings, and of
kindly dispositions. And with people of this latter kind he used to have
a great deal of kindly intercourse, cheerful enough at times--for he
could both make a joke and take one--but which usually did his friends
good in the end. So long as my father and my mother lived, he used to
travel across the country once every year to pay them a visit; and he
was accompanied, on one of these journeys, by one of this less religious
class of his parishioners, who had, however, a great regard for him, and
whom he liked, in turn, for his blunt honesty, and obliging disposition.
They had baited for some time at a house in the outer skirts of my
brother's parish, where there was a child to baptize, and where, I fear,
Donald must have got an extra dram; for he was very argumentative all
the evening after; and finding he could not agree with my brother on any
one subject, he suffered him to shoot a-head for a few hundred yards,
and did not again come up with him, until, in passing through a thick
clump of natural wood, he found him standing, lost in thought, before a
singularly-shaped tree. Donald had never seen such a strange-looking
tree in all his days before. The lower part of it was twisted in and
out, and backwards and forwards, like an ill-made cork-screw; while the
higher shot straight upwards, direct as a line; and its taper top
seemed like a finger pointing at the sky. 'Come, tell me, Donald,' said
my brother, 'what you think this tree is like?' 'Indeed, I kenna, Mr.
Lachlan,' replied Donald; 'but if you let me take that straight bit aff
the tap o't, it will be gey an' like the _worm_ o' a whisky still.' 'But
I cannot want the straight bit,' said my brother; 'the very pith and
point of my comparison lies in the straight bit. One of the old fathers
would perhaps have said, Donald, that that tree resembled the course of
the Christian. His early progress has turns and twists in it, just like
the lower part of that tree; one temptation draws him to the
left--another to the right: his upward course is a crooked one; but it
is an upward course for all that; for he has, like the tree, the
principle of sky-directed growth within him: the disturbing influences
weaken as grace strengthens, and appetite and passion decay; and so the
early part of his career is not more like the warped and twisted trunk
of that tree, than his latter years resemble its taper top. He shoots
off he