that Mr. Ewart's education
was far superior to the line he at present occupied.

'Oh, Criffel to Solway Moss!' said the other. Why, man, I should have
been an expounder of the word, with a wig like a snow-wreath, and a
stipend like--like--like a hundred pounds a year, I suppose. I can spend
thrice as much as that, though, being such as I am. Here he sang a scrap
of an old Northumbrian ditty, mimicking the burr of the natives of that
county:--

'Willy Foster's gone to sea,
Siller buckles at his knee,
He'll come back and marry me--
Canny Willy Foster.'

'I have no doubt,' said Fairford, 'your present occupation is more
lucrative; 'but I should have thought the Church might have been more'--

He stopped, recollecting that it was not his business to say anything
disagreeable.

'More respectable, you mean, I suppose?' said Ewart, with a sneer, and
squirting the tobacco-juice through his front teeth; then was silent for
a moment, and proceeded in a tone of candour which some internal touch
of conscience dictated. 'And so it would, Mr. Fairford--and happier,
too, by a thousand degrees--though I have had my pleasures too. But
there was my father (God bless the old man!) a true chip of the old
Presbyterian block, walked his parish like a captain on the quarterdeck,
and was always ready to do good to rich and poor--Off went the laird's
hat to the minister, as fast as the poor man's bonnet. When the eye saw
him--Pshaw! what have I to do with that now?--Yes, he was, as Virgil
hath it, "VIR SAPIENTIA ET PIETATE GRAVIS." But he might have been the
wiser man, had he kept me at home, when he sent me at nineteen to study
Divinity at the head of the highest stair in the Covenant Close. It
was a cursed mistake in the old gentleman. What though Mrs. Cantrips of
Kittlebasket (for she wrote herself no less) was our cousin five
times removed, and took me on that account to board and lodging at six
shillings instead of seven shillings a week? it was a d--d bad saving,
as the case proved. Yet her very dignity might have kept me in order;
for she never read a chapter excepting out of a Cambridge Bible, printed
by Daniel, and bound in embroidered velvet. I think I see it at this
moment! And on Sundays, when we had a quart of twopenny ale, instead
of butter-milk, to our porridge, it was always served up in a silver
posset-dish. Also she used silver-mounted spectacles, whereas even my
father's were cased in mere horn.