How is it but on this account, that Scotsmen who have emigrated to our colonies have in so many instances written of their Sabbath evenings at home as among the most "sunny memories" of their youth? And it is a fact of much significance that an old ecclesiastical law of Scotland expressly provides that a religious fast shall never be held on the Lord's day, for this special reason, that the Sabbath was intended to be a day of joy. 5. _On the other hand, we are bound to acknowledge that there have been foreign brethren who have visited our island-shores, that have traced the picture of our Scottish Sabbath in colours greatly brighter than the reality._--They have only seen half the truth, and therefore they have only told the half. As they have beheld the streams of our church-going people crowding along the streets of our cities to our numerous temples, they have failed to reflect how even the best gifts of heaven, the Sabbath and the sunlight, are the most ready to be abused, and that, at that very moment, there were thousands loitering at home in indolence, and even not a few, perhaps, rioting in intemperance. At the same time, with all these sombre exceptions, that are necessary to be introduced as shadows into any truthful picture of a Scottish Sabbath, we do not wonder that good and intelligent visitors from continental countries have been impressed and delighted by the spectacle of such a day in Scotland. These are but exceptions after all. And there is surely something of high moral sublimity in the sight of a whole people, once in every week, ceasing from their business and their toil to celebrate the great facts of Creation and Redemption--"the plough left to sleep in the furrow," the loom motionless, the anvil silent, the mine and the factory tenantless, and the whole monotony of common life turned and elevated into a kind of sacred praise. This solemn pause over the wide extent of Scotland, seen still more perfectly in her rural districts than in her great cities, strikes us as the nearest approach we have ever known to national worship. And we do not wonder that all the great poets of our land,--our uninspired prophets, whose work it is to reflect and to idealise our purest national feelings,--should so often have "sung the Sabbath," and that the Sabbath pictures of our national poet Burns in his "Cottar's Saturday Night," though, alas, he seldom consecrated his great gifts to religion, shine as the most beautiful passages in a poem that seems marked for immortality.