"_our_ bukes." One sees the little skirmishing, when master
wants trees planted one way and man sees best to plant them another; and
the magnanimity with which kindly, cross-grained Tom at last agrees, on
reflection, to "take his honor's advice" about the management of his
honor's own property. Here, between master and man, both freemen, is all
that beauty of relation sometimes erroneously considered as the peculiar
charm of slavery. Would it have made the relation any more picturesque
and endearing had Tom been stripped of legal rights, and made liable to
sale with the books and furniture of Abbotsford? Poor Tom is sleeping
here very quietly, with a smooth coverlet of green grass. Over him is
the following inscription: "Here lies the body of Thomas Purdie, wood
forester at Abbotsford, who died 29th October, 1829, aged sixty-two
years. Thou hast been faithful over a few things; I will make thee ruler
over many things." Matt. xxv. 21.

We walked up, and down, and about, getting the best views of the
building. It is scarcely possible for description to give you the
picture. The artist, in whose mind the conception of this building
arose, was a Mozart in architecture; a plaintive and ethereal lightness,
a fanciful quaintness, pervaded his composition. The building is not a
large one, and it has not that air of solemn massive grandeur, that
plain majesty, which impresses you in the cathedrals of Aberdeen and
Glasgow. As you stand looking at the wilderness of minarets and flying
buttresses, the multiplied shrines, and mouldings, and cornices, all
incrusted with carving as endless in its variety as the frostwork on a
window pane; each shrine, each pinnace, each moulding, a study by
itself, yet each contributing, like the different strains of a harmony,
to the general effect of the whole; it seems to you that for a thing so
airy and spiritual to have sprung up by enchantment, and to have been
the product of spells and fairy fingers, is no improbable account of the
matter.

Speaking of gargoyles--you are no architect, neither am I, but you may
as well get used to this descriptive term; it means the water-spouts
which conduct the water from the gutters at the eaves of these
buildings, and which are carved in every grotesque and fanciful device
that can be imagined. They are mostly goblin and fiendish faces, and
look as if they were darting out of the church in a towering passion, or
a fit of diabolic disgust and malice. Beside