shall find the money to buy a
new one.

Have you ever read the "Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith," by
that pleasing poet and most amiable man, the late David Macbeth Moir?
I have been looking into it lately; and I have regretted much that the
Lowland Scotch dialect is so imperfectly understood in England, and that
even where so far understood its raciness is so little felt; for great
as is the popularity of that work, it is much less known than it
deserves to be. Only a Scotchman can thoroughly appreciate it. It is
curious, and yet it is not curious, to find the pathos and the polish of
one of the most touching and elegant of poets in the man who has
with such irresistible humor, sometimes approaching to the farcical,
delineated humble Scotch life. One passage in the book always struck me
very much. We have in it the poet as well as the humorist and it is a
perfect example of what I have been trying to describe in the pages
which you have read. I mean the passage in which Mansie tells us of a
sudden glimpse which, in circumstances of mortal terror, he once had of
the future. On a certain "awful night" the tailor was awakened by cries
of alarm, and, looking out, he saw the next house to his own was on fire
from cellar to garret. The earnings of poor Mansie's whole life were
laid out on his stock in trade and his furniture, and it appeared likely
that these would be at once destroyed.

"Then," says he, "the darkness of the latter days came over my spirit
like a vision before the prophet Isaiah; and I could see nothing in the
years to come but beggary and starvation,--myself a fallen-back old man,
with an out-at-the-elbows coat, a greasy hat, and a bald brow,
hirpling over a staff, requeeshting an awmous; Nanse a broken-hearted
beggar-wife, torn down to tatters, and weeping like Rachel when she
thought on better days; and poor wee Benjie going from door to door with
a meal-pock on his back."

Ah, there is exquisite pathos _there_, as well as humor; but the thing
for which I have quoted that sentence is its startling truthfulness. You
have all done what Mansie Wauch did, I know. Every one has his own way
of doing it, and it is his own especial picture which each sees; but
there has appeared to us, as to Mansie, (I must recur to my old figure,)
as it were a sudden rift in the clouds that conceal the future, and
we have seen the way, far ahead,--the dusty way,--and an aged pilgrim
pacing slowly along it; and in th