teach to such a man? What good could he derive from the calm air
of the house of worship? He sent his only son to the city, with
injunctions instilled into him to make the most of all transactions, at
every hazard but that of his money; and the consequence was, in a few
years, shame, ruin, and expatriation. His only daughter, imprisoned,
dispirited, enthralled, fell a prey to a vulgar seducer; and being
driven from her father's house, abandoned herself, in hopeless misery,
to a life of prostitution. His wife, heartbroken by cruelty and
affliction, was never afterwards altogether in her right mind, and now
sits weeping by the hearth, or wanders off to distant places, lone
houses and villages, almost in the condition of an idiot--wild-eyed,
loose-haired, and dressed like a very beggar. Speculation after
speculation failed--with farmyard crowded with old stacks, he had to
curse three successive plentiful harvests--and his mailing was now
destitute. The unhappy man grew sour, stern, fierce, in his calamity;
and, when his brain was inflamed with liquor, a dangerous madman. He is
now a sort of cattle-dealer--buys and sells miserable horses--and at
fairs associates with knaves and reprobates, knowing that no honest man
will deal with him except in pity or derision. He has more than once
attempted to commit suicide; but palsy has stricken him--and in a few
weeks he will totter into the grave.

There is a Cottage in that hollow, and you see the smoke--even the
chimney-top, but you could not see the Cottage itself, unless you were
within fifty yards of it, so surrounded is it with knolls and small
green eminences, in a den of its own, a shoot or scion from the main
stem of the valley. It is called THE BROOM, and there is something
singular, and not uninteresting, in the history of its owner. He married
very early in life, indeed when quite a boy, which is not, by the way,
very unusual among the peasantry of Scotland, prudent and calculating as
is their general character. David Drysdale, before he was thirty years
of age, had a family of seven children, and a pretty family they were as
might be seen in all the parish. His life was in theirs, and his mind
never wandered far from his fireside. His wife was of a consumptive
family, and that insidious and fatal disease never showed in her a
single symptom during ten years of marriage; but one cold evening awoke
it at her very heart, and in less than two months it hurried her into
the