ound of
potassium in a pot of porter?" "I should think there would be a number
of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow; but for me
the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type of much that is
most human. For this inquirer, who conceived himself to burn with a zeal
entirely chemical, was really immersed in a design of a quite different
nature: unconsciously to his own recently breeched intelligence, he was
engaged in literature. Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial
p, mediant t--that was his idea, poor little boy! So with politics and
that which excites men in the present, so with history and that which
rouses them in the past: there lie, at the root of what appears, most
serious unsuspected elements.

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke,
all three Royal Burghs--or two Royal Burghs and a less distinguished
suburb, I forget which--lies continuously along the seaside, and boasts
of either two or three separate parish churches, and either two or three
separate harbours. These ambiguities are painful; but the fact is
(although it argues me uncultured), I am but poorly posted up on
Cellardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers. A tricklet of a
stream divides them, spanned by a bridge; and over the bridge at the
time of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the
west. This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his
fond tenancy he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I remember
rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and pictures, and
snatches of verse in the vein of _exegi monumentum_; shells and pebbles,
artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his medium; and I like to
think of him standing back upon the bridge, when all was finished,
drinking in the general effect, and (like Gibbon) already lamenting his
employment.

The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century. Mr.
Thomson, the "curat" of Anstruther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious to
the devout: in the first place, because he was a "curat"; in the second
place, because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life; and in
the third place, because he was generally suspected of dealings with the
Enemy of Man. These three disqualifications, in the popular literature
of the time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing
quite by itself, and, in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment. He had
been at a frien