Alas, Scotland--ay, well-educated, moral, religious Scotland can show, in the bosom of her bonny banks and braes, cases worse than this; at which, if there be tears in heaven, the angels weep. Look at that greyheaded man, of threescore and upwards, sitting by the wayside! He was once an Elder of the Kirk, and a pious man he was, if ever piety adorned the temples--"the lyart haffets, wearing thin and bare," of a Scottish peasant. What eye beheld the many hundred steps, that one by one, with imperceptible gradation, led him down--down--down to the lowest depths of shame, suffering, and ruin! For years before it was bruited abroad through the parish that Gabriel Mason was addicted to drink, his wife used to sit weeping alone in the spence when her sons and daughters were out at their work in the fields, and the infatuated man, fierce in the excitement of raw ardent spirits, kept causelessly raging and storming through every nook of that once so peaceful tenement, which for many happy years had never been disturbed by the loud voice of anger or reproach. His eyes were seldom turned on his unhappy wife except with a sullen scowl, or fiery wrath; but when they did look on her with kindness, there was also a rueful self-upbraiding in their expression, on account of his cruelty; and at sight of such transitory tenderness, her heart would overflow with forgiving affection, and her sunk eyes with unendurable tears. But neither domestic sin nor domestic sorrow will conceal from the eyes and the ears of men; and at last Gabriel Mason's name was a byword in the mouth of the scoffer. One Sabbath he entered the kirk in a state of miserable abandonment, and from that day he was no longer an elder. To regain his character seemed to him, in his desperation, beyond the power of man, and against the decree of God. So he delivered himself up, like a slave, to that one appetite, and in a few years his whole household had gone to destruction. His wife was a matron, almost in the prime of life, when she died; but as she kept wearing away to the other world, her face told that she felt her years had been too many in this. Her eldest son, unable, in pride and shame, to lift up his eyes at kirk or market, went away to the city, and enlisted into a regiment about to embark on foreign service. His two sisters went to take farewell of him, but never returned; one, it is said, having died of a fever in the Infirmary--just as if she had been a pauper; and the other--for the sight of sin, and sorrow, and shame, and suffering, is ruinous to the soul--gave herself up, in her beauty, an easy prey to a destroyer, and doubtless has run her course of agonies, and is now at peace. The rest of the family dropt down, one by one, out of sight, into inferior situations in far-off places; but there was a curse, it was thought, hanging over the family, and of none of them did ever a favourable report come to their native parish; while he, the infatuated sinner, whose vice seemed to have