h's aid. Mr. Pollock is the confidential repository of all their
secrets: nothing in their lives is hidden from him; he knows all of
comic and tragic in their lowly careers. Along with his wife, he visits
every house in the place, and from intimate knowledge can tell you,
nodding his head to this or that house as he walks along, the worth or
worthlessness of every native of the village. His time is so fully taken
up with pure religion and undefiled, that he has no time to waste on the
Higher Criticism.

A tout for some wandering minstrels recently came over from Aberdeen,
meaning to leave one of his red-and-yellow bills (announcing a
performance) in each of the local shops. The minister saw him as he
distributed the bills, and closely followed up on his trail. Mr. Pollock
entered each shop and said to the shopkeeper: "Please let me see the
bill you have there in the window." On getting it, he would scan it, and
request to get keeping it. In no shop was he refused, so that by the
time he got to the end of the village, he was carrying two dozen large
concert placards, while the tout, merrily whistling, and all unconscious
of the nullity of his labours, was on his way back to Aberdeen. "Lead us
not into temptation," said the minister, as he thrust the garish
announcements into his study stove. None of Mr. Pollock's flock were at
the concert that night. Perhaps, if any had gone, little harm would have
been done. The minister, however, thought they were better at home, or
at the local prayer-meeting.

Mr. Pollock's predecessor was a thin, unemotional man--a geologist--who
spent an important percentage of his time chipping rocks and looking for
fossils. Owing to this mania, his flock were forgotten, and came to
forget _him_. No wonder if the church attendance dwindled! _Ab uno disce
omnes_, as Virgil says. One day this ordained geologist had agreed to
baptize a child in a hamlet some miles away, and set forth to walk to
the place in good time. Unhappily, by the roadside, there was a quarry,
into which, by instinct, the minister glided, keen and eager-eyed. He
stayed therein for four hours, and forgot all about the infant
(squalling, no doubt, in special robe, and impatient for the
christening), the waiting relatives, the inevitable decanter, and the
thick cuts of indigestible bun. The minister, I say, trudged home with
his treasure-trove of petrified ferns and foot-marked shale--a greater
fossil than any under his own cases