What an unspeakable blessing to the inhabitants were the parish schools of the north, and how much humble worth and laborious diligence has been found among their teachers. In those lowly seminaries, boys not only attained the rudiments of learning, but the principles of loyalty and genuine religion, with the abatement of a small tincture of idolatry, of which their household gods were the only objects. Never, surely, was a mode of education so calculated to cherish attachment to those tutelar deities. Even the laird’s son had often a mile or two to walk to his day school; a neighbouring tenant’s son carried the basket which contained his simple dinner; and still as they went along they were joined by other fellow travellers in the paths of learning. How cordial were those intimacies, formed in the early period of life, and of the day while nature smiled around in dewy freshness! How gladdening to the kind and artless heart were these early walks through the wild varieties of a romantic country, and among the peaceful cottages of simple peasants, from whence the incense of praise, “in sounds by distance made more sweet,” rose on the morning breeze![22] How cheering was the mid-day sport, amid their native burns and braes, without the confinement of a formal play-ground! How delightful the evening walk homeward, animated by the consciousness of being about to meet all that was dearest to the artless and affectionate mind! Thus the constitution was improved with the understanding; and they carried abroad into active life, the rigid fibre of the robust and hardy frame, and the warm and fond affections of the heart, uncorrupted and true to its first attachments. Never sure were youth’s first glowing feelings more alive than in the minds of those young soldiers. From school they were hurried into the greatest fatigues and hardships, and the horrors of the most sanguinary war; and from thence transported to the depth of those central forests, where they formed to themselves a little world, whose greatest charm was the cherished recollection of the simple and endeared scenes of their childhood, and of the beloved relations whom they had left behind, and to whom they languished to return. They had not gone through the ordeal of the world, and could not cheer their exile by retracing its ways, its fashions, or its amusements. It is this domestic education, that unbroken series of home joys and tender remembrances, that render the natives of the north so faithful to their filial and fraternal duties and so attached to a bleak and rugged region, excelled in genial warmth of climate and fertility of soil, in every country to which the spirit of adventure leads them. Footnote 22: