ind 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
merriment, 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 labour, 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
In the make of that wonderful creature called man,
No two virtues, whatever relation they claim,
Nor even two different shades of the same.
Though like as was ever twin-brother to brother.
Possessing the one shall imply you've the other."--BURNS.

During my period of convalescence, I amused myself in hewing for my
uncles, from an original design, an ornate dial-stone; 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 t