e of his wife, recently dead; and a poor
idiot, who found his living in the kitchen, and to whom the deceased had
shown kindness; used to come every day to the churchyard, to sit beside
me, and jabber in broken expressions his grief. I was struck with the
extremeness of his idiocy: he manifested even more than the ordinary
inability of his class to deal with figures, for he could scarce tell
whether nature had furnished him with one head or with two; and no power
of education could have taught him to count his fingers. He was equally
defective, too, in the mechanical. Angus could not be got into trousers;
and the contrivance of the button remained a mystery which he was never
able to comprehend. And so he wore a large blue gown, like that of a
beadsman, which slipped over his head, and was bound by a belt round his
middle, with a stout woollen shirt underneath. But, though unacquainted
with the mystery of the button, there were mysteries of another kind
with which he seemed to have a most perfect acquaintance: Angus--always
a faithful attendant at church--was a great critic in sermons; nor was
it every preacher that satisfied him; and such was his imitative turn,
that he himself could preach by the hour, in the manner--so far at
least as voice and gesture went--of all the popular ministers of the
district. There was, however, rather a paucity of idea in his
discourses: in his more energetic passages, when he struck the book and
stamped with his foot, he usually iterated, in sonorous Gaelic--"The
wicked, the wicked, O wretches the wicked!" while a passage of a less
depreciatory character served him for setting off his middle tones and
his pathos. But that for which his character was chiefly remarkable was
an instinctive, foxlike cunning, that seemed to lie at its very basis--a
cunning which co-existed, however, with perfect honesty, and a devoted
attachment to his patron the proprietor.

The town of Cromarty had its poor imbecile man of quite a different
stamp. Jock Gordon had been, it was said, "like other people" till his
fourteenth year, when a severe attack of illness left him bankrupt in
both mind and body. He rose from his bed lame of a foot and hand, his
one side shrunken and nerveless, the one lobe of his brain apparently
inoperative, and with less than half his former energy and intellect;
not at all an idiot, however, though somewhat more helpless--the poor
mutilated fragment of a reasoning man. Among his other