t the hypothetical agents of which he knew
nothing. Such was the natural philosophy of old John; and in this
special instance geologic science has since fully confirmed his
decision. He was chiefly a favourite among us, however, from his even
and cheerful temper, and his ability of telling humorous stories, that
used to set the barrack in a roar, and in which he never spared himself,
if the exhibition of a weakness or absurdity gave but point to the fun.
His narrative of a visit to Inverness, which he had made when an
apprentice lad, to see a sheep-stealer hung, and his description of the
terrors of a night-journey back, in which he fancied he saw men waving
in the wind on almost every tree, till on reaching his solitary barrack
he was utterly prostrated by the apparition of his own great-coat
suspended from a pin, has oftener than once convulsed us with laughter.
But John's humorous confessions, based as they always were on a strong
good sense, that always saw the early folly in its most ludicrous
aspect, never lowered him in our eyes. Of his wonderful skill as a
workman, much was incommunicable; but it was at least something to know
the principles on which he directed the operations of what a
phrenologist would perhaps term his extraordinary faculties of _form_
and _size_; and so I recognise old John as one of not the least useful
nor able of my many teachers. Some of his professional lessons were of a
kind which the south and east country masons would be the better for
knowing. In that rainy district of Scotland of which we at this time
occupied the central tract, rubble walls built in the ordinary style
leak like the bad roofs of other parts of the country; and
mansion-houses constructed within its precincts by qualified workmen
from Edinburgh and Glasgow have been found to admit the water in such
torrents as to be uninhabitable, until their more exposed walls had been
slated over like their roofs. Old John, however, always succeeded in
building water-tight walls. Departing from the ordinary rule of the
builder elsewhere, and which on the east coast of Scotland he himself
always respected, he slightly elevated the under beds of his stones,
instead of laying them, as usual, on the dead level; while along the
edges of their upper beds he struck off a small rude champer; and by
these simple contrivances, the rain, though driven with violence against
his work, coursed in streams along its face, without entering into the