This sombre background was somewhat relieved by the glints of the firelight on a few gilt picture frames containing portraits, and by a few steel engravings built curiously in among the books. Those dear old engravings, which forty years ago embellished every middle class home in Scotland,--John Knox preaching, Queen Mary at Leith after Sir William Allan, and Duncan's stirring memorials of Prince Charlie--they were good wholesome art for every day life, and likely to stir the children's hearts, as did the ballads sung round the hearths of an earlier generation, to an honest love of the brave and the beautiful, and a sturdy pride in their Scottish birth. We have higher art now-a-days, or we think so. We spend more money on it; and if not more discriminative, are at least greatly more critical; but is the moral influence of our walls on our households better now than it was then? The boys and girls of to-day will grow up less narrow. Will they be as loyal and true-hearted? But to return to the study of the Reverend Roderick Brown, licentiate of the Free Church of Scotland. On the window-shelf were pots of hardy roses in luxuriant bloom, and in the distant corner stood a tall crimson cloth screen of many leaves, behind which were concealed the bed and toilette appurtenances of his reverence the licentiate. Beyond this a door communicated with an inner room; but here there are signs unmistakable of a lady's chamber, so we may not intrude. Drawn up before the fire there stands a large writing-table, on which are books and much manuscript, and at one end sits the occupant, deep in the composition of one of the five or six discourses he will be expected to deliver in the course of the following week. A tall young man under thirty, well-proportioned and even athletic, but pale and thin, and rather worn as regards the face. The straight black hair which he has tossed back from his face in the throes of composition, displays a forehead pale, blue-veined, and high, but rather narrow, eyes dark and deep-set, beneath shaggy brows, in hollow and blue-rimmed sockets, as of one who has gone through much excitement and fatigue, but burning with a steady fire of enthusiasm, which seems as if it would never go out, so long as a drop of the oil of life remains in the lamp to supply it with fuel. The mouth is long and flexible, not without signs of firmness and vigor, but gentle and serene, a smile appearing to lurk in one of the corners, as awaiting its opportunity to break forth. The whole expression is pure and unworldly. An observer must have said, that, whether or not he might be wise and prudent, he did not look like a fool, and he was most assuredly good.