his mastership, as if every high quality of genius were recognisable in him at a glance. If I knew of any unmistakable and tangible reason for all this I would not hesitate to name it, but I am not in the secret, and I have no right to guess. There are some sort of strings somewhere, and somebody pulls them. So much is evident on the face of things. Who work the contemptible _fantoccini_ who gesticulate to the Ephesian hubbub of ‘greatness’ I neither know nor care, but it is simply out of credence that their motions are spontaneous. _Expede Herculem_. I will take a solitary story from Mr. Crockett’s ‘Stickit Minister.’ It is called ‘The Courtship of Allan Fairley,’ The tale is of a young minister of the peasant class, whose parents through much privation have kept their son at college. He is elected to a living in an aristocratic parish, and takes his old peasant mother to keep house for him. Some of his more polished parishioners object to the old lady’s presence at the manse, and they have the rather astonishing impertinence to propose that the son shall send her away. He refuses, and shows his visitors the door. These are the bare lines of the story so far as we are concerned with it. Think how Dr. Macdonald or J. M. Barrie would have handled this! The humour of either would have danced round the crass obtuseness of the deputation and the mingled wrath and amusement of the minister. The story bristles with opportunity for the presentation of human contrast. The chances are all there, and a story-teller of anything like genuine faculty could not have failed to see and to utilise some of them. Mr. Crockett misses every conceivable point of his own tale, and with a majestic clumsiness drags in the one thing which could possibly make it offensive. The minister has nothing to fear from his visitors, for it is expressly stated that he has a majority of three hundred and sixty-five in his spiritual constituency of four hundred and thirty-five. But Mr. Crockett’s point is that he was a hero for refusing to kick his own mother out of doors. He makes Mr. Allan Fairley tell his own tale, and the end of this portion of it runs thus: ‘He got no further; he wadna hae gotten as far if for a moment I had jaloosed his drift I got on my feet I could hardly keep my hands off them, minister as I was, but I said: “Gentlemen, you are aware of what you ask me to do? You ask me to turn out of the house the mither that bore me, the mither that learnt me ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd,’ the mither that wore her fingers near the bone that I might gang to the college, that selled her bit plenishin’ that my manse micht be furnished! Ye ask me to show her to the door--I’ll show you to the door!”--an’ to the door they gaed!’ “Weel done! That was my ain Allan!” cried I.’