hasty of temper, and contradiction brought fire from him like steel from flint. Short and fierce were his gusts of passion. I have seen him of an evening, with quivering hands and kindling eye, send a volley of oaths into a careless servant, and the next moment almost the reverend white head was bowed on his chair as he knelt at evening prayer. Of these faults, however, this evening we saw nothing. The old gentleman was kind and hospitable; full of talk, but his talk seemed to us of old-world things. On Lords Palmerston and Derby he was silent; he was eloquent on Mr Pitt and Mr Fox. He talked of the French Revolution and the actors thereof as contemporaries. Of the good Queen Victoria (for history is sure to call her that) he said nothing. His heart was with his memory, in the older days when George III. was king, and not an old king neither. Father M'Crimmon was a tall man, being in height considerably above six feet. He was thin, like his own island, where the soil is washed away by the rain, leaving bare the rock. His face was mountainously bony, with great pits and hollows in it. His eyes were gray, and had that depth of melancholy in them which is so often observed in men of his order. In heart he was simple as a child; in discourse slow, measured, and stately. There was something in his appearance that suggested the silence and solitude of the wilderness; of hours lonely to the heart, and bare spaces lonely to the eye. Although of another, and--as I think, else I should not profess it--a purer faith, I respected him at first, and loved him almost when I came to know him. Was it wonderful that his aspect was sorrowful, that it wore a wistful look, as if he had lost something which could never be regained, and that for evermore the sunshine was stolen from his smile? He was by his profession cut off from all the sweet ties of human nature, from all love of wife or child. His people were widely scattered: across the black moor, far up the hollow glens, blustering with winds or dimmed with the rain-cloud. Thither the grim man followed them, officiating on rare festival occasions of marriage and christening; his face bright, not like a window ruddy with a fire within, rather like a wintry pane tinged by the setting sun--a brief splendour that warms not, and but divides the long cold day that has already passed from the long cold night to come. More frequently he was engaged dispensing alms, giving advice in disaster, waiting by the low pallets of the fever-stricken, listening to the confession of long-hoarded guilt, comforting the dark spirit as it passed to its audit. It is not with viands like these you furnish forth life's banquet; not on materials like these you rear brilliant spirits and gay manners. He who looks constantly on death and suffering, and the unspiritual influences of hopeless poverty, becomes infected with congenial gloom. Yet cold and cheerless as may be his life, he has