but
certainly most true to themselves and to their own ideals of liberty and
of faith. Dr. Brown's great-grandfather had been a shepherd boy, who
taught himself Greek that he might read the New Testament; who walked
twenty-four miles--leaving his folded sheep in the night--to buy the
precious volume in St. Andrews, and who, finally, became a teacher of
much repute among his own people. Of Dr. Brown's father, he himself
wrote a most touching and beautiful account in his "Letter to John
Cairns, D.D." This essay contains, perhaps, the very finest passages
that the author ever penned. His sayings about his own childhood remind
one of the manner of Lamb, without that curious fantastic touch which is
of the essence of Lamb's style. The following lines, for example, are a
revelation of childish psychology, and probably may be applied, with
almost as much truth, to the childhood of our race:--

"Children are long of seeing, or at least of looking at what is above
them; they like the ground, and its flowers and stones, its 'red
sodgers' and lady-birds, and all its queer things; _their world is
about three feet high_, and they are more often stooping than gazing
up. I know I was past ten before I saw, or cared to see, the ceilings
of the rooms in the manse at Biggar."

I have often thought that the earliest fathers of our race, child-like in
so many ways, were child-like in this, and worshipped, not the phenomena
of the heavens, but objects more on a level with their eyes--the "queer
things" of their low-lying world. In this essay on his father, Dr. Brown
has written lines about a child's first knowledge of death, which seem as
noteworthy as Steele's famous passage about his father's death and his
own half-conscious grief and anger. Dr. Brown describes a Scottish
funeral--the funeral of his own mother--as he saw it with the eyes of a
boy of five years old, while his younger brother, a baby of a few months--

"leaped up and crowed with joy at the strange sight--the crowding
horsemen, the coaches, and the nodding plumes of the hearse . . .
Then, to my surprise and alarm, the coffin, resting on its bearers,
was placed over the dark hole, and I watched with curious eye the
unrolling of those neat black bunches of cords, which I have often
enough seen since. My father took the one at the head, and also
another much smaller, springing from the same point as his, which he
had caused