cal prowess. He used to
have a list of difficult passages ready for "my nephew," and the moment
the oracle gave a decision, the old man asked him to repeat it, and then
took a permanent note of it, and would assuredly preach it some day with
his own proper unction and power. One story of him I must give; my
father, who heard it not long before his own death, was delighted with
it, and for some days repeated it to every one. Uncle Ebenezer, with all
his mildness and general complaisance, was, like most of the Browns,
_tenax propositi_, firm to obstinacy. He had established a week-day
sermon at the North Ferry, about two miles from his own town,
Inverkeithing. It was, I think, on the Tuesdays. It was winter, and a
wild, drifting, and dangerous day; his daughters--his wife was
dead--besought him not to go; he smiled vaguely, but continued getting
into his big-coat. Nothing would stay him, and away he and the pony
stumbled through the dumb and blinding snow. He was half-way on his
journey, and had got into the sermon he was going to preach, and was
utterly insensible to the outward storm: his pony getting its feet
_balled_, staggered about, and at last upset his master and himself into
the ditch at the road-side. The feeble, heedless, rapt old man might
have perished there, had not some carters, bringing up whisky casks from
the Ferry, seen the catastrophe, and rushed up, raising him, and
_dichtin'_ him, with much commiseration and blunt speech--"Puir auld
man, what brocht ye here in sic a day?" There they were, a rough crew,
surrounding the saintly man, some putting on his hat, sorting and
cheering him, and others knocking the balls off the pony's feet, and
stuffing them with grease. He was most polite and grateful, and one of
these cordial ruffians having pierced a cask, brought him a horn of
whisky, and said, "Tak that, it'll hearten ye." He took the horn, and
bowing to them, said, "Sirs, let us give thanks!" and there, by the
road-side, in the drift and storm, with these wild fellows, he asked a
blessing on it, and for his kind deliverers, and took a tasting of the
horn. The men cried like children. They lifted him on his pony, one
going with him, and when the rest arrived in Inverkeithing, they
repeated the story to everybody, and broke down in tears whenever they
came to the blessing. "And to think o' askin' a blessin' on a tass o'
whisky!" Next Presbytery day, after the ordinary business was over, he
rose up--he seldo