pres wonted amusements, literary or scientific. We had been visit. ed, ten months after our marriage, by a little girl, whose ence had added not a little to our happiness: home became more emphatically such from the presence of the child, that in a few months had learned so well to know its mother, and in a few more to take its stand in the nurse's arms, at an upper window that commanded the street, and to recognize and make signs to its father as he approached the house. Its few little words, too, had a fascinating interest to our ears;—our own names, lisped in a language of its own, every time we approached; and the simple Scotch vocable "awa, awa," which it knew how to employ in such plaintive tones as we retired, and that used to come back upon us in recollection, like an echo from the grave, when, its brief visit over, it had left us forever, and its fair face and silken hair lay in darkness amid the clods of the church-yard. In how short a time had it laid hold of our affections! Two brief years before, and we knew it not; and now it seemed as if the void which it left in our hearts the whole world could not fill. We buried it beside the old chapel of St. Regulus, with the deep rich woods all around, save where an opening in front commands the distant land and the blue sea; and where the daisies, which had learned to love, mottle, star-like, the mossy mounds; and where birds, whose songs its ear had become skilful enough to distinguish, pour their notes over its little grave. The following simple but truthful stanzas, which I found among its mother's papers, seem to have been written in this place,-sweetest of buryinggrounds, a few weeks after its burial, when a chill and backward spring, that had scowled upon its lingering illness, broke out at once into genial summer : Thou'rt "awa, awa," from thy mother's side, And "awa, awa," from thy father's knee; Thou'rt "awa" from our blessing, our care, our caressing, But "awa" from our hearts thou'lt never be. All things, dear child, that were wont to please thee Are round thee here in beauty bright, There's music rare in the cloudless air, And the earth is teeming with living delight. Thou'rt "awa, awa," from the bursting spring time, Tho' o'er thy head its green boughs wave; And art thou "awa," and "awa" forever,- That head of nature's finest moulding,- Of ever-changing meaning threw ? Thy sweetness, patience under suffering, Ah me! 'twas here I thought to lead thee, And does my selfish heart then grudge thee, O, no! to me earth must be lonelier, CHAPTER XXV. "All for the Church, and a little less for the State." BELHAVEN. I HAD taken no very deep interest in the Voluntary controversy. There was, I thought, a good deal of overstatement and exaggeration on both sides. On the one hand the Voluntaries failed to convince me that a State endowment for ecclesiastical purposes is in itself in any degree a bad thing. I had direct experience to the contrary. I had evidence the most unequivocal that in various parts of the country it was a very excellent thing indeed. It had been a very excellent thing, for instance, in the parish of Cromarty, ever since the Revolution, down to the death of Mr. Smith,-in reality, a valuable patrimony of the people there; for it had supplied the parish, free of cost, with a series of popular and excellent ministers, whom otherwise the parishioners would have had to pay for themselves. And it had now given us my friend Mr. Stewart, one of the ablest and honestest ministers in Scotland, or elsewhere, whether Established or Dissenting. And these facts, which were but specimens of a numerous class, had a tangibility and solidity about them which influenced me more than all the theoretic reasonings pressed on my attention about the mischief done to the Church by the over-kindness of Constantine, or the corrupting effects of State favor. But then I could as little agree with some of my friends on the endowment side, that the Establishment, even in Scotland, was everywhere of value, as with some of the Voluntaries that it was nowhere of any. I had resided for months together in various parts of the country, where it would have mattered not a farthing to any one save the minister and his family, though the Establishment had been struck down at a blow. Religion and morals would have no more suffered by the annihilation of the minister's stipend, than by the suppression of the pension of some retired supervisor or superannuated officer of customs. Nor could I forget, that the only religion, or appearance of religion, that existed in parties of workmen among which I had been employed (as in the south of Scotland, for instance), was to be found among their Dissenters,-most of them, at the time, asserters of the Voluntary principle. If the other workmen were reckoned, statistically at least, adherents of the Establishment, it was not because they either benefited by it or cared for it, but only somewhat in the way that, according to the popular English belief, persons born at sea are held to be long to the parish of Stepney. Further, I did not in the least like the sort of company into which the Voluntary controversy had introduced the good men on both sides: it gave a common cause to the Voluntary and the Infidel, and drew them cordially together; and, on the other hand, placed side by side, on terms portentously friendly, the pious asserter of endowments and the irreligious old Tory. There was religion on both sides of the controversy, but a religious controversy it was not. The position of my grandmother's family, including, of course, Uncles James and Sandy, was a sort of midway one between the Secession and the Establishment. My grandmother had quitted the family of Donald Roy long ere he had been compelled, very unwillingly, to leave the Church; and as no forced settlements had taken place in the parish into which she had removed, and as its ministers had been all men of the right stamp, she had done what Donald himself had been so desirous to do,-remained an attached member of the Establishment. One of her sisters had, however, married in Nigg; and she and her husband, following Donald into the ranks of the Secession, had reared one of their boys to the ministry, who became, in course of time, the respected minister of the congregation which his great-grandfather had founded. And, as the contemporary and first cousin of my uncles, the minister used to call upon them every time he came to town; and my Uncle James, in turn (Uncle Sandy very rarely went to the country), never missed, when in Nigg or its neighborhood, to repay his visits. There was thus a good deal of intercourse kept up between the families, no without effect. Most of the books of modern theology which my uncles read were Secession books, recommended by their cousin ; and the religious magazines for which they subscribed was a Secession magazine. The latter bore, I remember, the name of the "Christian Magazine, or Evangelical Repository." It was not one of the brightest of periodicals, but a sound and solid one, with, as my uncles held, a good deal of the old unction about it; and there was, in especial, one of the contributors whose papers they used to pick out as of peculiar excellence, and not unfrequently read a second time. They bore the somewhat Greek-looking signature of Leumas, as if the writer had been a brother or cousin-german of some of the old Christians to whom Paul used to notify kind regards and good wishes at the end of his epistles; but it was soon discovered that Leumas was merely the proper name Samuel reversed, though who the special Samuel was who turned his signature to the right about, placing the wrong end foremost, and wrote with all the concise weight and gravity of the old divines, my uncles never knew. They had both passed away ere, in perusing the "Second Gallery of Literary Portraits," I found myself introduced to worthy old Leumas, also a denizen of the unseen world at the time, as the father of the writer of that brilliant work,—the Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee. This kind of writing had, of course, its proper effect on my uncles, and, through them, on the family: it kept up our respect for the Secession. The Established Church, too, was in those days a tolerably faulty institution. My uncles took an interest in missions; and the Church had none: nay, its deliberate de |