An almost universal circumstance tends to make every Scottish parochial schoolmaster discontented with his position and impatient of his duties. The parish-school is the stepping-stone to the kirk, and each schoolmaster when he is installed at the dominie’s desk, begins to long for the day when he will “wag his head in the poopit.” The school-house is the hard shell of the chrysalis; the manse, the flowery elysium of the full-fledged butterfly. When I went to school, our schoolmaster was in full cry after a kirk and a cure of souls. He spent a good deal of his time in reading the newspapers, and, as it appeared to me, in looking out for the demise of neighbouring ministers. Every morning after prayers, he read the newspapers for about an hour, during which time, we, the pupils, sat and learned our lessons, or more often amused ourselves, as quietly as we could. When any unusual disturbance took place, the master threw the “tag”—a piece of a gig trace burnt at the end to make it hard—at the offender. The pupil hit by it—no matter whether he was the real culprit or not—was expected to carry the instrument of punishment to the master and to accept flagellation, commonly on the hands, but not unfrequently (when the prospect of a kirk looked hazy and dim) upon a part of the body which required preliminary untrussing of points to be got at. It fell to the lot of Lizzy, the sweeper’s granddaughter, most frequently to have to take up the “tag.” Lizzy, it is true, was a very “limb” in point of trouble; but she had always more than her fair share of the gig trace. The way in which our schoolmaster lifted his hand against the female sex would have wholly disqualified him, in a nautical drama, from claiming the name of a British tar. The English reader may think that it equally disqualified him for the position of a British schoolmaster; but I do not remember that any one was shocked by these proceedings at the time. If a parent complained, it was not on the score of the indignity, but because the “tag” left its marks.