happiness.--“Happiness? oh, ay, weel enough; we’ve a great deal to be thankfu’ for,” said big Colin, with a little sleepy surprise; “if it werna for the sprouting corn and the broken weather; but I dinna see onything particular to be happy about at this minute, and I’m gaun to my bed.” For the prose and the poetry did not exactly understand each other at all times, even in the primitive farm-house of Ramore. CHAPTER III. The internal economy of a Scotch parish is not so clearly comprehensible now-a-days as it was in former times. Civilization itself has made countless inroads upon the original unities everywhere, and the changes that have come to pass within the recollection of the living generation are almost as great though very different from those which made Scotland during last century so picturesque in its state of transition. When Sunday morning dawned upon the Holy Loch, it did not shine upon that pretty rural picture of unanimous church-going so well-known to the history of the past. The groups from the cottages took different ways--the carriage from the Castle swept round the hill to the other side of the parish, where there was an “English Chapel.” The reign of opinion and liking was established in the once primitive community. Half of the people ascended the hillside to the Free Church, while the others wound down the side of the loch to the Kirk, which had once accommodated the whole parish. This state of affairs had become so usual that even polemical feeling had ceased to a great extent, and the two streams of church-going people crossed each other placidly without recriminations. This day, for a wonder, the sun was shining brightly, notwithstanding a cloudy stormy sky, which now and then heaved forward a rolling mass of vapour, and dispersed it sharply over the hills in a flying mist and shower.