It will be evident that Carmichael's visitation belonged to a different department of art from that of Dr. Davidson. He arrived without intimation by the nearest way that he could invent, clothed in a shooting jacket and a soft hat, and accompanied by at least two dogs. His coming created an instant stir, and Carmichael plunged at once into the life of the household. It is kept on fond record, and still told by the surviving remnant of his flock, that on various occasions and in the course of pastoral visitation he had turned the hay in summer, had forked the sheaves in harvest-time, had sacked the corn for market, and had driven a gude wife's churn. After which honourable toil he would eat and drink anything put before him except boiled tea, against which he once preached with power--and then would sit indefinitely with the family before the kitchen fire, telling tales of ancient history, recalling the old struggles of Scottish men, describing foreign sights, enlarging on new books, till he would remember that he had only dropped in for an hour, and that two meals must be waiting for him at the manse. His visits were understood to be quite unfinished, and he left every house pledged to return and take up things at the point where he had been obliged to break off, and so he came at last in this matter of visitation into a condition of hopeless insolvency. His adventures were innumerable and always enjoyable--falling off the two fir trees that made a bridge over our deeper burns, and being dried at the next farm-house--wandering over the moor all night and turning up at a gamekeeper's at daybreak, covered with peat and ravening with hunger--fighting his way through a snowstorm to a marriage, and digging the bridegroom out of a drift--dodging a herd of Highland cattle that thought he had come too near their calves, or driving off Drumsheugh's polled Angus bull with contumely when he was threatening Mrs. Macfadyen. If he met the bairns coming from school, the Glen rang with the foolery. When Willie Harley broke his leg, Carmichael brought his dog Jackie--I could tell things of that dog--and devised dramatic entertainments of such attraction that Jamie Soutar declared them no better than the theatre, and threatened Carmichael with a skep of honey as a mark of his indignation. As for the old women of the Glen, he got round them to that extent that they would gossip with him by the hour over past days, and Betty Macfarlane was so carried by the minister's sympathy that she brought out from hidden places some finery of her youth, and Carmichael was found by Miss Carnegie arranging a faded Paisley shawl on Betty's shoulders. And was it not this same gay Free Kirkman who trained an eleven to such perfection on a field of Drumsheugh's that they beat the second eleven of Muirtown gloriously? on which occasion Tammas Mitchell, by the keenness of his eye and the strength of his arm, made forty-four runs; and being congratulated by