hat in dealing
with a case of aggravated truancy he dropped into Gaelic. Bailie
McCallum used to refer in convivial moments to his schooldays under
Bulldog, and always left it to be inferred that had it not been for that
tender, fostering care, he had not risen to his high estate in Muirtown.
Fathers of families who were elders in the kirk, and verging on grey
hair, would hear no complaints of Bulldog, for they had passed under the
yoke in their youth, and what they had endured with profit--they now
said--was good enough for their children. He seemed to us in those days
like Melchizedek, without father or mother, beginning or end of days;
and now that Bulldog has lain for many a year in a quiet Perthshire
kirkyard, it is hardly worth while visiting Muirtown Seminary.

Every morning, except in vacation, he crossed the bridge at 8.45, with
such rigid punctuality that the clerks in the Post Office checked the
clock by him, and he returned by the way he had gone, over the North
Meadow, at 4.15, for it was his grateful custom to close the
administration of discipline at the same hour as the teaching,
considering with justice that any of the Muirtown varlets would rather
take the cane than be kept in, where from the windows he could see the
North Meadow in its greenness, and the river running rapidly on an
afternoon. It would have been out of place for Bulldog to live in a
Muirtown street, where he must have been overlooked and could not have
maintained his necessary reserve. Years ago he had built himself a house
upon the slope of the hill which commanded Muirtown from the other side
of the river. It was a hill which began with wood and ended in a lofty
crag; and even from his house, halfway up and among the trees, Bulldog
could look down upon Muirtown, compactly built together on the plain
beneath, and thinly veiled in the grey smoke which rose up lazily from
its homes. It cannot be truthfully said that Bulldog gave himself to
poetry, but having once varied his usual country holiday by a visit to
Italy, he ever afterwards declared at dinner-table that Muirtown
reminded him of Florence as you saw that city from Fiesole, with the
ancient kirk of St. John rising instead of the Duomo, and the Tay
instead of the Arno. He admitted that Florence had the advantage in her
cathedral, but he stoutly insisted that the Arno was but a poor,
shrunken river compared with his own; for wherever Bulldog may have been
born, he boasted himself