ght a revelation to me:

'Twas a dream of those ages of darkness and blood,
When the minister's home was the mountain and wood;
When in Wellwood's dark valley the standard of Zion,
All bloody and torn, 'mong the heather was lying.

I persuaded my Mother to explain to me what it was all about, and
she told me of the affliction of the Scottish saints, their
flight to the waters and the wilderness, their cruel murder while
they were singing 'their last song to the God of Salvation'. I
was greatly fired, and the following stanza, in particular,
reached my ideal of the Sublime:

The muskets were flashing, the blue swords were gleaming,
The helmets were cleft, and the red blood was streaming,
The heavens grew dark, and the thunder was rolling,
When in Wellwood's dark muirlands the mighty were falling.

Twenty years later I met with the only other person whom I have
ever encountered who had even heard of 'The Cameronian's Dream'.
This was Robert Louis Stevenson, who had been greatly struck by
it when he was about my age. Probably the same ephemeral edition
of it reached, at the same time, each of our pious households.

As my Mother's illness progressed, she could neither sleep, save
by the use of opiates, nor rest, except in a sloping posture,
propped up by many pillows. It was my great joy, and a pleasant
diversion, to be allowed to shift, beat up, and rearrange these
pillows, a task which I learned to accomplish not too awkwardly.
Her sufferings, I believe, were principally caused by the
violence of the medicaments to which her doctor, who was trying a
new and fantastic 'cure', thought it proper to subject her. Let
those who take a pessimistic view of our social progress ask
themselves whether such tortures could today be inflicted on a
delicate patient, or whether that patient would be allowed to
exist, in the greatest misery in a lodging with no professional
nurse to wait upon her, and with no companion but a little
helpless boy of seven years of age. Time passes smoothly and
swiftly, and we do not perceive the mitigations which he brings
in his hands. Everywhere, in the whole system of human life,
improvements, alleviations, ingenious appliances and humane
inventions are being introduced to lessen the great burden of
suffering.

If we were suddenly transplanted into the world of only fifty
years ago, we should be startled and even horror-stricken by the
wretchedness to which the step backwards wo