o a ditch as if he
had been a highwayman.

The first thing that strikes me in reading Rutherford's letters to young
Earlston and to several other young men of that day is the extraordinary
frankness and self-forgetfulness of the writer. He takes his young
correspondents into his confidence in a remarkable way. He opens up his
whole heart to them. He goes back with a startling boldness and
unreserve and plainness of speech on his own youth, and he lays himself
alongside of his youthful correspondents in a way that only a strong man
and a humble could afford to do. Let young men read Rutherford's letters
to young William Gordon of Earlston, and to young John Gordon of
Cardoness, and to young Lord Boyd, and such like, and they will be
surprised to find that even Samuel Rutherford was once a young man
exactly like themselves, and that he never forgot the days of his youth
nor the trials and temptations and transgressions of those perilous days.
Let them read his Letters, and they will see that Rutherford could not
only write home to the deepest experiences of Lady Boyd and Lady Kenmure
and Marion M'Naught, but that he was quite as much at home with their
sons and daughters also.

Rutherford told young Earlston how terribly he had 'ravelled his own
hesp' in the days of his youth, and he tells another of his
correspondents that after eighteen years he was not sure he had even yet
got his ravelled hesp put wholly right. Young Edinburgh gentlemen who
have been born with the silver spoon in their mouth will not understand
what a ravelled hesp is. But those who have been brought up at the pirn-
wheel in Thrums, and in suchlike handloom towns, have the advantage of
some of their fellow-worshippers to-night. They do not need to turn to
Dr. Bonar's Glossary or to Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary to find out
what a ravelled hesp is. They well remember the stern yoke of their
youth when they were sent supperless to bed because they had ravelled
their hesp, and all the old times rush back on them as Rutherford
confesses to Earlston how recklessly he ravelled his hesp when he was a
student in Edinburgh, and how, twenty times a day, he still ravels it
after he is Christ's prisoner in Aberdeen.

When the hesp is ravelled the pirn is badly filled, and then the shuttle
is choked and arrested in the middle of its flight, the web is broken and
knotted and uneven, and the weaver is dismissed, or, at best, he is fined
in half his wages