rilliant upon the final, "I says." Another _chef-d'oeuvre_ was, "On
Tintock tap there is a mist, and in the mist there is a kist (a chest),
and in the kist there is a cap (a wooden bowl), and in the cap there is
a drap, tak' up the cap, and sup the drap, and set the cap on Tintock
tap." This he could say, if I mistake not, five times without drawing
breath. It was a favorite passage this, and he often threatened to treat
it exegetically; laughing heartily when I said, in that case, he would
not have great trouble with the _context_, which in others cost him a
good deal.

His manners to ladies, and indeed to all women, was that of a courtly
gentleman; they could be romantic in their _empressement_ and devotion,
and I used to think Sir Philip Sydney, or Ariosto's knights and the
Paladins of old, must have looked and moved as he did. He had great
pleasure in the company of high-bred, refined thoughtful women; and he
had a peculiar sympathy with the sufferings, the necessary mournfulness
of women, and with all in their lot connected with the fruit of that
forbidden tree--their loneliness, the sorrows of their time, and their
pangs in travail, their peculiar relation to their children. I think I
hear him reading the words, "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that
she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea" (as if it
was the next thing to impossible), "she may forget, yet will not I
forget thee." Indeed, to a man who saw so little of, and said so little
to his own children, perhaps it may be _because_ of all this, his
sympathy for mothers under loss of children, his real suffering for
their suffering, not only endeared him to them as their minister, their
consoler, and gave him opportunities of dropping in divine and saving
truth and comfort, when the heart was full and soft, tender, and at his
mercy, but it brought out in his only loss of this kind, the mingled
depth, tenderness, and also the peremptoriness of his nature.

In the case of the death of little Maggie--a child the very image of
himself in face, lovely and pensive, and yet ready for any fun, with a
keenness of affection that perilled everything on being loved, who must
cling to some one and be clasped, made for a garden, for the first
garden, not for the rough world, the child of his old age--this peculiar
meeting of opposites was very marked. She was stricken with sudden
illness, malignant sore throat; her mother was gone, and so she was to
m