l drenched in blood, your
hand grasping the broken sabre, and two grim Frenchmen lying hacked and
hewed at your feet! Your father and your mother saw your name in the
"Great Lord's" Despatch; and it was as much as he could do to keep her
from falling on the floor, for "her joy was like a deep affright!" Both
are dead now; and better so, for the sight of that blotched face and
those glazed eyes, now and then glittering in fitful frenzy, would have
killed them both, nor, after such a spectacle, could their old bones
have rested in the grave.

Alas, Scotland--ay, well-educated, moral, religious Scotland can show,
in the bosom of her bonny banks and braes, cases worse than this; at
which, if there be tears in heaven, the angels weep. Look at that
greyheaded man, of threescore and upwards, sitting by the wayside! He
was once an Elder of the Kirk, and a pious man he was, if ever piety
adorned the temples--"the lyart haffets, wearing thin and bare," of a
Scottish peasant. What eye beheld the many hundred steps, that one by
one, with imperceptible gradation, led him down--down--down to the
lowest depths of shame, suffering, and ruin! For years before it was
bruited abroad through the parish that Gabriel Mason was addicted to
drink, his wife used to sit weeping alone in the spence when her sons
and daughters were out at their work in the fields, and the infatuated
man, fierce in the excitement of raw ardent spirits, kept causelessly
raging and storming through every nook of that once so peaceful
tenement, which for many happy years had never been disturbed by the
loud voice of anger or reproach. His eyes were seldom turned on his
unhappy wife except with a sullen scowl, or fiery wrath; but when they
did look on her with kindness, there was also a rueful self-upbraiding
in their expression, on account of his cruelty; and at sight of such
transitory tenderness, her heart would overflow with forgiving
affection, and her sunk eyes with unendurable tears. But neither
domestic sin nor domestic sorrow will conceal from the eyes and the ears
of men; and at last Gabriel Mason's name was a byword in the mouth of
the scoffer. One Sabbath he entered the kirk in a state of miserable
abandonment, and from that day he was no longer an elder. To regain his
character seemed to him, in his desperation, beyond the power of man,
and against the decree of God. So he delivered himself up, like a slave,
to that one appetite, and in a few years his who