There was one feature of our school which appears very startling to me now, but which was never regarded as extraordinary by any of us at the time. It was this. Illegitimate mingled with the legitimate offspring of the same parents. Our parish was rather celebrated for irregularity in the matter of births, owing entirely to a local proneness to irregularity in the matter of marriage. This was not confined to the lower classes. Gentlemen farmers, who moved in the minister’s own circle, occasionally appeared before the Session to be admonished, and this sometimes led to the scandalous anomaly of a gentleman farmer dining at the manse one week and sitting on the stool of repentance the next. As there was only one school in the neighbourhood, and as it was considered imperative that every child, no matter what the circumstances of its birth, or position, should be educated, it constantly happened that there were several duplicates of families at the parochial school. In several instances, that I well remember, the illegitimate scion lived in perfect harmony with the legitimate in the bosom of the same family, and not unfrequently the illegitimate member was regarded as the flower of the flock. I can call up before me now two Marys and two Peters. The two Marys lived under the same roof as sisters, and I never heard a word of reproach cast at the elder Mary, albeit she was prettiest, cleverest, and illegitimate. It was different with the two Peters. Peter the First lived with his mother, Hagar, in the desert, an outcast from the paternal roof. But on the common ground of the parochial school, he sat on the same form, stood up in the same class, and shared equally in the Justification and Adoption of the Shorter Catechism with Peter the true-born. Peter the Base often enjoyed the satisfaction of giving Peter the True a “good licking;” but these quarrels never originated in resentment, arising out of their invidious relationship. So, you see, we were a strange, heterogeneous assemblage at this Scotch school. A stranger aspect still was occasionally presented when two or three grown men and women took their places among us. I remember Betty, the laird’s nurse, coming for a quarter to improve her handwriting; and, nearly at the same time, the grown-up son of a neighbouring farmer, who had an ambition to become acquainted with mensuration and surveying. Betty had scarcely got to “round hand,” before the farmer’s son, who was accustomed to pursue his studies on the opposite side of the desk, fell in love with her, and the upshot of it was that the farmer’s son and Betty threw learning to the winds, and went and got married before the quarter was out. When Betty was squaring her elbows out at the large text, the laird’s son was wont to take great delight in walking past her and jogging her arm, in revenge for the ruthless way in which Betty used to clean out his ears with a piece of rough flannel on washing nights.