f "Christopher North," or more
familiarly, "Kit North." Professor Wilson was a man of great physical
power and of striking appearance. In character, he was vehement and
impulsive; but his writings show that he possessed feelings of deep
tenderness.
###

The rite of baptism had not been performed for several months in the kirk
of Lanark. It was now the hottest time of persecution; and the inhabitants
of that parish found other places in which to worship God, and celebrate
the ordinances of religion. It was now the Sabbath day, and a small
congregation of about a hundred souls had met for divine service, in a
place more magnificent than any temple that human hands had ever built to
Deity. The congregation had not assembled to the toll of the bell, but
each heart knew the hour and observed it; for there are a hundred sundials
among the hills, woods, moors, and fields; and the shepherd and the
peasant see the hours passing by them in sunshine and shadow.

The church in which they were assembled, was hewn by God's hand out of the
eternal rock. A river rolled its way through a mighty chasm of cliffs,
several hundred feet high, of which the one side presented enormous
masses, and the other corresponding recesses, as if the great stone girdle
had been rent by a convulsion. The channel was overspread with prodigious
fragments of rocks or large loose stones, some of them smooth and bare,
others containing soil and verdure in their rents and fissures, and here
and there crowned with shrubs and trees. The eye could at once command a
long-stretching vista, seemingly closed and shut up at both extremities by
the coalescing cliffs. This majestic reach of river contained pools,
streams, and waterfalls innumerable; and when the water was low--which was
now the case, in the common drought--it was easy to walk up this scene
with the calm, blue sky overhead, an utter and sublime solitude.

On looking up, the soul was bowed down by the feeling of that prodigious
height of unscalable, and often overhanging, cliff. Between the channel
and the summit of the far extended precipices, were perpetually flying
rooks and wood pigeons, and now and then a hawk, filling the profound
abyss with their wild cawing, deep murmur, or shrilly shriek. Sometimes a
heron would stand erect and still, on some little stone island, or rise up
like a white cloud along the black walls of the chasm, and disappear.
Winged creatures alone could inhabit this region. T