distant horizon--the sheep roved along the steep--the goats clung to the cliffs. There the hawk and the raven had their abode; and there hung their nests from the projecting rock, or the horizontal tree. The heath was the nursery of its wild inmates. The whaup, and plover, and lapwing piped, and whistled, and fluttered around me. I was in the midst of their nesting-ground; and they seemed disposed to sacrifice me to their fears. Overhead were the lofty peaks of Queensberry--the greater and the less twin pillars--over which the pediment of heaven was spread. The mist trailed and deepened. I beheld its approach; and witnessed its breaking up into shreds and patches. I saw the first gleam of the sunshine, as it struggled through the density, and stood revealed in all the glory of a full effulgence of sunlight. My fishing-rod, a hazel sapling, was in my hand, and I pulled from streams and gullets of the most tiny dimensions large black and yellow trouts. There they lay, amidst the wet spret, or on the velvet fringe of the streamlet, in all the glory of scale and fin. My soul leaped in unison to their motions; and I absolutely danced in ecstasy. When I gained the mountain summit--O my God! what impressions I have had of beauty and sublimity! On the one hand, the dark, southern range, ranging away eastward in barren magnitude; on the other, the green and softly-outlined Lead Hills, rounded into magnificence. Before me, and stretching far southward, the distant Criffell, lumbering on the horizon; the sunny Solway, gleaming in light; the Nith, winding and coqueting with its fertile banks and fruitful plains; the Annan, a younger but scarcely less lovely sister, running its lateral course to the same ultimate destiny, the nascent feeders of the Clyde, Carsehope, and Darr, bursting from their mossy cradles into the wilderness around them, rejoicing in their solitudes, and in their numerous and undisturbed inmates. Oh, what is education--the alphabet in all its combinations and significations--to this! When in after life I have had occasion to animate my public addresses with simile, or to inspire them with sentiment--when at the desk, and with the pen in my hand, I have fished in my brain for metaphor or illustration--I have constantly recurred to my infant, my boyish home; to my native glen, and woods, and streams, and cliffs, and mountains; and when I have once seated myself on the Cat-craig, or on a branch of the oak or the birch, I feel myself quite at home. I can, indeed, call spirits, as I do now, from the depths of imagination and feeling--I can ascend in the spiral movements of that blue smoke, which lies so soft and silky between me and the opposite green sward. I can sympathise with those devout and happy hearts, which, in simple female habiliments, are now plying the wheel, or preparing the frugal repast within. I see the domestic fowls, in their sunny happiness, flapping their wings in the dusty corner of the kail-yard, or crowing in frolic