ess of the back-road, and uncle, doubtless, lighting
his black and ruminative pipe.

If my uncle brought up nuts to crack, my father was sure to have some
difficulties to consult about, or some passages to read, something that
made him put his whole energy forth; and when he did so, I never heard
such reading. To hear him read the story of Joseph, or passages in
David's history, and Psalms 6th, 11th, and 15th, or the 52d, 53d, 54th,
55th, 63d, 64th, and 40th chapters of Isaiah, or the Sermon on the
Mount, or the Journey to Emmaus, or our Saviour's prayer in John, or
Paul's speech on Mars' Hill, or the first three chapters of Hebrews and
the latter part of the 11th or Job, or the Apocalypse; or, to pass from
those divine themes--Jeremy Taylor, or George Herbert, Sir Walter
Raleigh, or Milton's prose, such as the passage beginning "Come forth
out of thy royal chambers, O thou Prince of all the kings of the earth!"
and "Truth, indeed, came once into the world with her divine Master," or
Charles Wesley's Hymns, or, most loved of all, Cowper, from the rapt
"Come thou, and, added to thy many crowns," or "O that those lips had
language!" to the Jackdaw, and his incomparable Letters; or Gray's
Poems, Burns's "Tam O'Shanter," or Sir Walter's "Eve of St. John,"[18]
and "The Gray Brother."

[18] Well do I remember when driving him from Melrose to Kelso
long ago, we came near Sandyknowe, that grim tower of
Smailholm standing erect like a warder turned to stone,
defying time and change his bursting into that noble
ballad--

"The Baron of Smaylho'me rose with day,
He spurr'd his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way,
That leads to Brotherstone;"

and pointing out the "Watchfold height," "the eiry Beacon
Hill," and "Brotherstone."

But I beg your pardon: Time has run back with me, and fetched that
blessed past, and awakened its echoes. I hear his voice; I feel his eye;
I see his whole nature given up to what he is reading, and making its
very soul speak.

Such a man then as I have sketched, or washed faintly in, as the painters
say, was that person who sat in the corner under the gallery every
Sabbath-day, and who knew his Greek Testament better than his minister.
He is dead too, a few months ago, dying surrounded with his cherished
hoard of books of all sizes, times, and tongues--tatterdemalion many; all
however draw