st trees; the fruit-trees had extended their branches over
the verges of the little yards, and the hedges had shot up into huge and
irregular bushes; while quantities of dock, and nettles, and hemlock,
hiding the ruined walls, were busily converting the whole scene of
desolation into a picturesque forest-bank.

Two houses in St. Ronan's were still in something like decent repair;
places essential--the one to the spiritual weal of the inhabitants, the
other to the accommodation of travellers. These were the clergyman's
manse, and the village inn. Of the former we need only say, that it
formed no exception to the general rule by which the landed proprietors
of Scotland seem to proceed in lodging their clergy, not only in the
cheapest, but in the ugliest and most inconvenient house which the
genius of masonry can contrive. It had the usual number of
chimneys--two, namely--rising like asses' ears at either end, which
answered the purpose for which they were designed as ill as usual. It
had all the ordinary leaks and inlets to the fury of the elements, which
usually form the subject of the complaints of a Scottish incumbent to
his brethren of the presbytery; and, to complete the picture, the
clergyman being a bachelor, the pigs had unmolested admission to the
garden and court-yard, broken windows were repaired with brown paper,
and the disordered and squalid appearance of a low farm-house, occupied
by a bankrupt tenant, dishonoured the dwelling of one, who, besides his
clerical character, was a scholar and a gentleman, though a little of a
humourist.

Beside the manse stood the kirk of St. Ronan's, a little old mansion
with a clay floor, and an assemblage of wretched pews, originally of
carved oak, but heedfully clouted with white fir-deal. But the external
form of the church was elegant in the outline, having been built in
Catholic times, when we cannot deny to the forms of ecclesiastical
architecture that grace, which, as good Protestants, we refuse to their
doctrine. The fabric hardly raised its grey and vaulted roof among the
crumbling hills of mortality by which it was surrounded, and was indeed
so small in size, and so much lowered in height by the graves on the
outside, which ascended half way up the low Saxon windows, that it might
itself have appeared only a funeral vault, or mausoleum of larger size.
Its little square tower, with the ancient belfry, alone distinguished it
from such a monument. But when the grey-he