After having exhausted all the means of instruction which an adjacent town supplied, he was obliged to have recourse to the grammar school of a neighbouring parish, about four miles distant from his home. For two years, neither summer's heat nor winter's snow were for a day allowed to frustrate his walking thither. He never returned till late in the afternoon; sometimes the evening star was the herald of his approach; and, during the brief days, towards the end or about the commencement of the year, darkness had set in before his face glimmered by the bickering fire of his parental hearth. Habits of temperance had been familiar to him all his days. Some cheese and oaten cake, regularly deposited in his satchel, served him for dinner, during the interval of school hours, after mid-day--and these he ate, walking about or reclining on the turf; but the warm tea and toast always awaited his evening arrival, and were set before him with all a mother's mindfulness and punctuality. He was diligent at his books; and, being endowed by nature with good parts, he made a very fair and promising progress. He had none of that intellectual cleverness which makes advances by sudden fits and starts, and then relapses into apathy and idleness; but his steady industry, his attention, and his assiduity, gave omens favourable to his success, while his gentle and conciliatory manners gained him not only the love of his schoolfellows, but the esteem of his instructor. It was now evident, that, from the pains and expense taken in regard to his education, he was destined for the pulpit--that climax of the honours and distinctions ever aimed at by a poor but respectable Scottish family. Years of rigid economy had been passed, almost without affording any hope as to the ultimate success and attainment of their laudable end. His destination, almost unknown to himself, having been thus early fixed, it was resolved that he should be sent to Edinburgh, to attend the college there, professedly as a student of divinity. The expense, resulting from this resolution, bore hard upon their slender circumstances; but they were determined still farther to exert themselves, indulging the fond hope, that, one day or other, they would reap the reward of their honourable endeavours in the prosperity of their son. To the university he set off, amid the ill-concealed tears of some, and the open and hearty blessings of all--so much were they attached to one, who, till that day, had never been even more temporarily separated from them, without many a caution, perhaps little required, to guard against the evil contaminations of the capital--little thinking, in their simple minds, that the slender means allowed him were barely sufficient for necessary purposes, without indulging in any uncalled for luxury, and that gold is the only key that fits pleasure's casket.