hat this was a little thing, but contends
that he did it in a great way.

We showed the tired stranger to his room. Distinguished guests we have
had beneath the roof of St. Cuthbert's manse. We once had Major Pond,
the great cicerone of great lecturers; he had brought Ian Maclaren to
our town, who in turn brought the spring to all of us, beguiling
moisture even from long-sullen clouds.

He had stayed with Mr. Blake, which was but fair, for these are wealth's
real prerogatives; but the genial Major stayed with us. We were greatly
charmed, for he charmed us till two o'clock in the morning; and my wife,
fearful that she might stampede him to his bed, rose at intervals and
hid her face in the geranium window when she had to yawn. But it was the
clock and not the Major that provoked these mild convulsions. He
rehearsed to us his glorious achievements with his "stars." Some few
plaints he had, wherein he "wept o'er his wounds," but almost all his
tales were "tales of valour done." He told the number of his "stars,"
vividly described how he held them in his right hand, pointed out to us
how one "star" differeth from another "star" in glory, and went to bed
at last with the air of a man who had gilded the Pleiades, brushed up
Castor and Pollux, and house-cleaned the heavens generally.

Stanley, Farrar, Beecher, and a score of others filtered through him as
he sat by our humble fire, turning his telescope this way and that as a
sportsman turns his gun, while the very clock ticked slow to listen. My
wife became quite confused, probably sun-struck, for she has since
affirmed that the Major claimed to have been present at the birth of
every one of these famous men on whom he early resolved to confer
immortality. My recollection of his night's autobiography is rather that
of a lane of dazzling light, in which there stood now one and now
another giant, but all alike clinging to the Major's hand.

But this does not exhaust our list of the famous men whose ponderous
heads have pressed the pillow whereon the exiled Angus now laid his own
to rest. For we once had the Moderator. The Moderator of what? some
unsophisticated gentile will wish to know. Of the General Assembly, of
course, for that is the Westminster Assembly of Divines in recurring
resurrection, and it hath its unadjourning court in heaven, as the
ambushed correspondent of the Hebrews doth inform us. Which proves, my
precentor tells me, that the New Jerusalem is a Presbyter