My picture has arrived, and I have got it hung in a favourable light, in a place of honour above the mantelpiece. I became quite excited when it was delivered, and, like a child with a new toy, was impatient to see it, and to gloat over it. But the lid of the wooden case was tightly screwed down; and, as a hammer and a saw were the only joinery tools which Betty possessed, I had to call in Deacon Webster's aid, and Betty, poor body, got no peace till he arrived with his screwdriver. When at length the picture was taken out of its packing I noticed there was no signature in the corner, and this at the time was a keen disappointment to me; but it has ceased to trouble me now, because I have the feeling that it will shortly bear the artist's name, and till that time comes, when I am not admiring her handiwork, I shall just entertain myself filling the corner space with names which appeal to my mind as fitting and appropriate. When I asked Nathan's opinion of my purchase, he looked several times very deliberately from me to the picture; then, after a pause, informed me he had 'never till noo seen purple gress.' I explained to him that this was the purple sunset glow; but he shook his head sceptically, spat in my fire, and walked slowly ben into the kitchen. Betty, who spent her early girlhood in the Keir, is delighted that a picture in which her native parish hills are depicted should be hanging on her walls, and she was very anxious to know who the painter was, and how it came into my possession. I just said I was very much interested in the artist, and that the picture had been sent from Edinburgh. She pointed out to me, what I hadn't noticed before, that the bright richness of the gold frame made the others shabby and tarnished-looking, and she warmly advocated the application of a liquid gold paint which John Boyes retails at sixpence a bottle, and which, she assures me, 'is liker pure gold than a sovereign.' Betty dearly loves to dabble in paint. It was Nathan who acquainted me with this predilection, and he instanced a case of her blue-enamelling the long hazel crook, the representative staff of the Ancient Order of Shepherds, which on gala-days he carries in the procession; and another, when she varnished, with a strange concoction, a workbox which she has never been able to open since. Knowing this, I purposely belittled Boyes's liquid, and assured her that in a week or two our eyes would become so accustomed to the conditions that we shouldn't distinguish any difference between the frames. It grieves me very much to thwart Betty; though, truth to tell, I seldom have occasion to do so, as our opinions on the big things of life, the essentials, are rarely in conflict, and the smaller we think not worth wrangling over; so I talked her into a gracious, amenable humour, and ultimately took leave of the subject in what I considered mutual agreement.