in its time have perplexed the wits of ten successive classes at St. Andrew’s. By that strong intuition which ever characterizes superior genius, even at its earliest dawn, he found out that this was a volume worthy of being read, and throwing aside the Shorter Catechism of the Kirk, which had been furnished him by his parents for his recreation, as well as the exploits of George Buchannan, the History of Buckhaven, the exquisite biography of Paddy from Cork, and the sweet songs of Sir James the Rose, and the Laird of Coull’s Ghost, with which he had contrived to furnish himself, he set fondly and furiously to work upon Simpson’s Euclid, preparing his floor, and drawing his diagrams in the same manner, though not exactly in the same materials, as the philosophers of antiquity. The smooth grassy sod answered all the purposes of the abacus, and the cows generously supplied him in a substitute for the sand. Spreading and smoothing that substitute with his bare foot, he engraved upon it with his finger the mystic lines and letters; and, with book in hand, proceeded to establish the elementary principles of geometry, heedless though the cows should, in the mean time, scale the fence, and carry the neighbouring corn by a _coupe de la bouche_. One day as he was occupied in this learned work, the parson of the village happened to be on the other side of the hedge, pacing backwards and forwards, and cudgelling his reluctant and retentive brains for as much of the raw material of sermonizing as would serve to put him and his parishioners over the ensuing Sunday. While he paced and pleaded with the sluggish spirit, his ear was assailed by a continued _mumbling_ of voice through the hedge, which caught so much stronger a hold of him than he could do of his sermon, that his steps and his study were both brought to a dead stand, and his outward ears perked up in the fondest attitude of listening. Ministers as well as men often remember the words of that of which they were never able to grapple with the meaning; and thus, though the old parson did not exactly comprehend the extent of that proposition, the diagram of which the young philosopher had traced upon his soft abacus, and the demonstration of which he was rehearsing in very solemn tones, yet he remembered that such words had been used by one of the professors in that part of his academic course which he had never understood. That which is known is always simple, and that which is not known, however simple it may be in itself, is always accounted the very depth of wisdom. The parson was astonished, and, for a moment, he doubted the evidence of those ears upon which he had had to depend through a long life. He tried the one, it caught, “The angles at the base of an isosceles triangle;” he tried the other, it continued the enunciation, “are equal to one another.” He poked his head half way through the hedge, and the auxiliary testimony of his eyes and spectacles confirmed that of his ears.