Not that Scotland was without schooling long before the days of School Boards. In out-of-the-way parts of the Highlands, as well as in Lowland Gandercleughs, Dr. Johnson could hear of day-schools, even boarding-schools, kept here and there under difficulties, perhaps in summer by a bookish youth who for his winter studies walked all the way to Aberdeen or Glasgow. When a society seemed necessary for the diffusion of Christian knowledge in the Highlands, thanks to John Knox every English-speaking and Shorter Catechism-conning parish, at least, had its dominie, who, thanks to those land-grabbing Lords of the Congregation, was often such a “downtrodden, underfoot martyr” as Carlyle deplores, eking out his exiguous dues by a medley of occupations, and by unworthy perquisites that fell to him at the annual cock-fighting holiday. He was fain not only to perform all the duties of his school, down to mending pens and sharpening the points of his tawse, but to act as precentor, session-clerk, and general man of business for the parish; “even the story ran that he could gauge.” He has been known to play the cobbler in his hours of ease. Not seldom he was a “stickit minister,” qualified to wag his head in a pulpit, if he could get one, hindered perhaps from that eminence by some infirmity, such as a tied tongue or a too red nose. Often he was a “character,” who has figured in many a tale told by graceless Roderick Randoms when they grew out of dread of his skelpings and palmies. The most famous of such presentments ought to be Jedediah Cleishbotham, who presents himself as quite superfluously editing the _Tales of My Landlord_; but few impatient readers of our day spend much time over the mystifying patter with which that Wizard of the North thought necessary to introduce his feats of imagination. I should like, by the way, to point out how the self-important schoolmaster of Gandercleugh seems to have sent a thriving progeny across the Atlantic. Surely it is one of his family who, as the Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., so long occupied a pulpit at Jaalam, Mass., where one “talented parishioner,” Hosea Biglow, might call cousins with the Peter Pattieson who penned a story when he should have been engrossing rudimentary instruction on the skins of the lower classes.