le household had gone to
destruction. His wife was a matron, almost in the prime of life, when
she died; but as she kept wearing away to the other world, her face told
that she felt her years had been too many in this. Her eldest son,
unable, in pride and shame, to lift up his eyes at kirk or market, went
away to the city, and enlisted into a regiment about to embark on
foreign service. His two sisters went to take farewell of him, but never
returned; one, it is said, having died of a fever in the Infirmary--just
as if she had been a pauper; and the other--for the sight of sin, and
sorrow, and shame, and suffering, is ruinous to the soul--gave herself
up, in her beauty, an easy prey to a destroyer, and doubtless has run
her course of agonies, and is now at peace. The rest of the family dropt
down, one by one, out of sight, into inferior situations in far-off
places; but there was a curse, it was thought, hanging over the family,
and of none of them did ever a favourable report come to their native
parish; while he, the infatuated sinner, whose vice seemed to have
worked all the woe, remained in the chains of his tyrannical passion,
nor seemed ever, for more than the short term of a day, to cease hugging
them to his heart. Semblance of all that is most venerable in the
character of Scotland's peasantry! Image of a perfect patriarch, walking
out to meditate at eventide! What a noble forehead! Features how high,
dignified, and composed! There, sitting in the shade of that old wayside
tree, he seems some religious Missionary, travelling to and fro over the
face of the earth, seeking out sin and sorrow, that he may tame them
under the word of God, and change their very being into piety and peace.
Call him not a hoary hypocrite, for he cannot help that noble--that
venerable--that apostolic aspect--that dignified figure, as if bent
gently by Time, loth to touch it with too heavy a hand--that holy
sprinkling over his furrowed temples of the silver-soft, and the
snow-white hair--these are the gifts of gracious Nature all--and Nature
will not reclaim them, but in the tomb. That is Gabriel Mason--the
Drunkard! And in an hour you may, if your eyes can bear the sight, see
and hear him staggering up and down the village, cursing, swearing,
preaching, praying--stoned by blackguard boys and girls, who hound all
the dogs and curs at his heels, till, taking refuge in the smithy or the
pot-house, he becomes the sport of grown clowns, and, a