hat surrounded Logie
House--lying as it does upon the south side of Balgay Hill, and flanked
on the east by a deep gully, wherethrough runs a small stream, which, so
far as I know, has no name--were locked at night. The terrors of this
place, at the late hours when these said henchmen behoved to seek their
savoury rewards, were the only drawback to Aminadab's supreme bliss.

And if the time of these symposial meetings had been somewhat later in
the century, how much more formidable would have been a passage through
this contracted valley of tumuli and bones! No churchyard, except those
of Judea, was ever invested with such terrors--not the mystical fears of
a divine fate seen in the descending cloud, with Justice gleaming with
fiery eyes on Sin, and holding those scales, the decision of which would
destine to eternal bliss or eternal woe, and that Justice personified in
Him "whose glory is a burning like the burning of a fire,"--no, but the
revolting fears produced by the profanity of that poor worm of very
common mud, which has been since the beginning of time acting the God.
Ay, the aurelia-born image of grace sees a difference when it looks from
the sun to the epigenetic thing which He raises out of corruption. There
was, in that small place of skulls, a rehearsal of the great day. We
hear little of these freaks now-a-days; but it was different then, when
men made themselves demons by drink. One night William Maule of Panmure,
then in his days of graceless frolic; Fletcher Read, the nephew of the
laird, and subsequently the laird himself, of Logie; Rob Thornton, the
merchant, Dudhope, and other kindred spirits, who used to sing in the
inn of Sandy Morren, the hotel-keeper, "Death begone, here's none but
souls," sallied drunk from the inn. The story goes that the night was
dark, and there stood at the door a hearse, which had that day conveyed
to the "howf," now about to be shut up because of its offence against
the nostrils of men who are not destined to need a grave, the wife of an
inconsolable husband and the mother of children; and thereupon came from
Maule's mouth--for wickedness will seek its playful function in a
pun--the proposition that the bacchanals should have a rehearsal in the
kirkyard of Logie. Well, it signified, of course, nothing that the Black
Princess had been buried there, so far away from the land of "the balmy
East,"

"Where the roses blow and the oranges grow,
And all is divine but man bel