Similarly the Kirk of Scotland by law established in Netherby presents all the characteristics of a little Bethel meeting-house. And a new minister of æsthetic tastes has to wrestle with the fact, that there is no place in which to bestow an organ, except in the coal-cellar from which the heating apparatus is worked. But both the Auld Lichts and the Baptists are housed in haughty fanes—not large, indeed, but built on the most approved cathedral principles. The meeting-house of the Baptists, indeed, has no less than two spires and the beginnings of another, after the fashion of Lichfield. The whole front of the Free Kirk is a-glitter with quartz-faced rocks. For during the time of its erection Theophilus Ruff would arrive each day with his pockets full of stones with this shell-white glance upon them. He even marked spots upon the moor, and sent out masons to bring the pieces which took his fancy. And one by one these all found their way into the frontage of the Free Kirk. The most curious point about all this building of religious edifices was, that Theophilus Ruff never allowed one of them to be finished. When the last turret of the spire was on the point of being finished, Theophilus would dismiss all the men, order the unfinished pinnacle to be covered with lead to preserve it from the weather, and so leave the church with an ugly hooded hump upon its back. Or he would leave a rough stone dyke and a dozen old sand pits and lime heaps lying for years about the gate, just as they had been thrown down at the time when the building was begun. He preferred to see one gate-post up and the other down. He had been known to build a mill and fit it with expensive machinery, to construct a mill-dam with the most approved modern sluices, and import the most advanced American "notions" in the way of farm implements. Then one fine morning he would arrive, and, when everything was almost complete, pay the labourers their wages, discharge the engineers in the midst of fixing a steam boiler or laying hot-water pipes for the most improved method of preparing food for cattle. Thereafter he would write their masters a cheque, and there was an end. Not an ounce of water would ever run out of that granite-embanked mill-dam. Not a wheel of that beautiful machinery would ever turn round. No horse wearing shoe-iron would ever tread the asphalted floor of these sanitary stables. Year after year the whole premises stood empty. The glass would early disappear from the windows under a galling cross-fire from the catapults of all the boys in the neighbourhood, with whom it was a point of honour to break everything breakable about the various "follies" of General Theophilus Ruff. Never did houses get the reputation of being haunted so quickly as those buildings erected by him in all manner of unlikely places. Even during the very week after the workmen had been unceremoniously dismissed, and while the new gloss was yet on the handles of the doors