thence to Thurso the journey is of a most dreary and
depressing character. He who wishes to see the romantic part of the
county should quit the train at Helmsdale, and go right to John o'
Groats by the shore road: thereafter he should proceed along the line of
the Pentland Firth to the dainty town of Thurso and to the village of
Reay, the citadel of the Mackays. The district round Reay is a
delightful one, and has great historical interest.

Some good examples of the power assumed of old by the country ministers
are furnished by a perusal of the life of an eighteenth century
minister, the Rev. Alexander Pope, who was stationed for many years in
Reay. He was a huge giant of a man, and invariably carried about with
him a nail-studded cudgel that was a terror to sinners. A lout of a
fellow in his parish refused to come to church and get rebuked for an
infringement of the usual commandment. Mr. Pope sent three elders with
ropes to pinion the adulterer, hale him to church, and fasten him to a
conspicuous pew right under the pulpit. The minister cannonaded the
culprit to his heart's content, beginning thus: "_Shame, shame, son of a
beggar, where art thou now?_"

Another parishioner who neglected family worship on the ground that he
could not make up a prayer, was severely taken to task by Mr. Pope, who
gave the man a year within which to manufacture one. At the end of the
twelvemonth, Mr. Pope called and requested to hear the prayer. The man
glibly rattled off a long succession of phrases that did not please the
minister at all. "That won't do," he said, "you must prepare over
again." "And is all my long labour to go for nothing," said the man,
"all my year's toil? No, no: rather than lose my labour, I'll _break the
prayer up and make two graces of it_." For the rest of his life, as the
story runs, he did actually employ the two parts of his mutilated prayer
as Grace before and Grace after meat respectively. Could there be a
finer example of natural thrift in the spiritual world?

An Inverness journalist, Mr. Carruthers, wrote a life of the great poet,
Alexander Pope, in which occurs the following curious note respecting
the minister of Reay, just mentioned: "The northern Alexander Pope
entertained a profound admiration for his illustrious namesake of
England; and it is a curious and well-ascertained fact that the simple
enthusiastic clergyman, in the summer of 1732, rode on his pony all the
way from Caithness to Twickenham