As he had a comfortable manse and a fair stipend, various efforts were made by the matrons of the neighbourhood to induce the minister to take a wife, and he used innocently to recount these interviews to his co-presbyters, who took care that they should not lose anything by repetition to the world outside. One of these interviews was thus related to me. A lady in his parish called on him, and after praising the manse and the garden and the glebe, expressed a fear that he must find it a great trouble to manage his house as well as his parish. He explained that he had an excellent housekeeper, who took great care of him, and managed the household to his entire satisfaction. ‘Ah, yes,’ said the visitor, ‘I’m sure Mrs. Campbell is very careful, but she canna be the same as a wife to you. You must often be very lonely here, all by yourself. But if you had a wife she would keep you from wearying, and would take all the management of the house off your hands, besides helping you with the work of the parish. Now Mr. ----there’s my Isabella, if you would but take her for your wife, she would be a perfect Abishag to you.’ This direct and powerful appeal, however, met with no better success than others that had gone before it. The incorrigible old divine lived, and, I believe, died in single blessedness. [Sidenote: AN AYRSHIRE MINISTER] In the Lowlands the younger ministers, educated in Edinburgh or Glasgow, and accustomed to the modernised service of the churches, and the more distinctive ecclesiastical garb of the officiating clergy, have lost the angularity of manner which marked older generations. I can remember, however, a number of parish ministers who belonged to an earlier and perhaps now extinct type. Though thoroughly earnest and devoted men, they would be regarded at the present day as at least irreverent, and their sayings and doings would no doubt scandalise modern eyes and ears. One of these clergymen had a large Ayrshire parish. He was apt to forget things, and on remembering them, to blurt them out at the most inappropriate times. On one occasion he had begun the benediction at the close of the service, when he suddenly stopped, exclaiming: ‘We’ve forgot the psalm,’ which he thereupon proceeded to read out. Another time, in the midst of one of his extempore prayers, he was asking for a blessing on the clergyman who was to address the people in the afternoon, when he interrupted himself to interject: ‘It’s in the laigh Kirk, ye ken.’