both in the same parish. Perhaps fifty scholars are there
taught--and with their small fees, and his small salary, Allan Easton is
contented. Allan was originally intended for the Church; but some
peccadilloes obstructed his progress with the Presbytery, and he never
was a preacher. That disappointment of all his hopes was for many years
grievously felt, and somewhat soured his mind with the world. It is
often impossible to recover one single false step in the slippery road
of life--and Allan Easton, year after year, saw himself falling farther
and farther into the rear of almost all his contemporaries. One became a
minister, and got a manse, with a stipend of twenty chalders; another
grew into an East India Nabob; one married the laird's widow, and kept a
pack of hounds--another expanded into a colonel--one cleared a plum by a
cotton-mill--another became the Croesus of a bank--while Allan, who
had beat them all hollow at all the classes, wore second-hand clothes,
and lived on the same fare with the poorest hind in the parish. He had
married, rather too late, the partner of his frailties--and after many
trials, and, as he thought, not a few persecutions, he got settled at
last, when his head, not very old, was getting grey, and his face
somewhat wrinkled. His wife, during his worst poverty, had gone again
into service, the lot, indeed, to which she had been born; and Allan had
struggled and starved upon private teaching. His appointment to the
parish school had, therefore, been to them both a blessed elevation. The
office was respectable--and loftier ambition had long been dead. Now
they are old people--considerably upwards of sixty--and twenty years'
professional life have converted Allan Easton, once the wild and
eccentric genius, into a staid, solemn, formal, and pedantic pedagogue.
All his scholars love him, for even in the discharge of such very humble
duties, talents make themselves felt and respected; and the kindness of
an affectionate and once sorely wounded, but now healed heart, is never
lost upon the susceptible imaginations of the young. Allan has sometimes
sent out no contemptible scholars, as scholars go in Scotland, to the
universities; and his heart has warmed within him when he has read
their names, in the newspaper from the manse, in the list of successful
competitors for prizes. During vacation-time, Allan and his spouse leave
their cottage locked up, and disappear, none know exactly whither, on
visits