whom the
Scottish climate will occasionally relax is Her Majesty Queen
Victoria, who for sixty years has exerted a benign influence on
British skies and at least secured sunshine on great parade days. Such
women are all too few!

In this wise enters His Grace the Lord High Commissioner to open the
General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; and on the same day there
arrives by the railway (but traveling first class) the Moderator of
the Church of Scotland, Free, to convene its separate Supreme Courts
in Edinburgh. He will have no Union Jacks, Royal Standards, Dragoons,
bands, or pipers; he will bear his own purse and stay at a hotel; but
when the final procession of all comes, he will probably march beside
His Grace the Lord High Commissioner, and they will talk together, not
of dead-and-gone kingdoms, but of the one at hand, where there are no
more divisions in the ranks, and where all the soldiers are simply
"king's men," marching to victory under the inspiration of a common
watchword.

It is a matter of regret to us that the U. P.'s, the third branch of
Scottish Presbyterianism, could not be holding an Assembly during this
same week, so that we might the more easily decide in which flock we
really belong. 22, Breadalbane Terrace now represents all shades of
religious opinion within the bounds of Presbyterianism. We have an
Elder, a Professor of Biblical Criticism, a Majesty's Chaplain, and
even an ex-Moderator under our roof, and they are equally divided
between the Free and the Established bodies.

Mrs. M'Collop herself is a pillar of the Free Kirk, but she has no
prejudice in lodgers, and says so long as she "mak's her rent she
doesna care aboot their releegious principles." Miss Diggity-Dalgety
is the sole representative of United Presbyterianism in the household,
and she is somewhat gloomy in Assembly time. To belong to a dissenting
body, and yet to cook early and late for the purpose of fattening
one's religious rivals, is doubtless trying to the temper; and then
she asserts that "meenisters are aye tume [empty]."

* * * * *

"You must put away your Scottish ballads and histories now, Salemina,
and keep your Concordance and your umbrella constantly at hand."

This I said as we stood on George IV. Bridge and saw the ministers
glooming down from the Mound in a dense Assembly fog. As the presence
of any considerable number of priests on an ocean steamer is supposed