My grandmother had attained a very advanced old age, yet was she straight in person, and perfect in all her mental faculties. Her countenance, which I still see distinctly, was expressive of good-will; and the wrinkles on her brow served to add a kind of intellectual activity to a face naturally soft, and even comely. She had told me so many stories, given me so many good advices, initiated me so carefully in the elements of all learning, "the small and capital letters," and, lastly, had so frequently interposed betwixt me and parental chastisement, that I bore her as much good-will and kindly feeling as a boy of seven years could reasonably be expected to exhibit. True it is, and of verity, that this kindly feeling was not incompatible with many acts of annoyance, for which I now take shame and express regret; but these acts were anything but malevolent, being committed under the view of self-indulgence merely. It was, therefore, with infinite concern that I received the intelligence from my mother that grannie was, in all probability, on the point of leaving us, and for ever. "Leaving us, and for ever," sounded in my ears like a dream of the night, in which I had seen the stream which passed our door swell suddenly into a torrent, and the torrent into a flood, carrying me, and everything around me, away in its waters. I felt unassured in regard to my condition, and was half disposed to believe that I was still asleep and imagining horrors! But when my mother told me that the disease which had for days confined my grandmother to bed would end in death--in other words, would place her alongside of my father's grave in the churchyard of Closeburn--I felt that I was not asleep, but awake to some dreadful reality, which was about to overtake us. From this period till within a few hours of her dissolution, I kept cautiously and carefully aloof from all intercourse with my grandmother--I felt, as it were, unwilling to renew an intercourse which was so certainly, and so soon, and so permanently to be interrupted; so I betook myself to the hills, and to the pursuit of all manner of bees and butterflies. I would not, in fact, rest; and as I lay extended on my back amidst the heath, and marked the soft and filmy cloud swimming slowly along, "making the blue one white," I thought of her who was dying, and of some holy and happy residence far beyond the utmost elevation of cloud, or sun, or sky. Again and again I have risen from such reveries to plunge myself headlong into the pool, or pursue with increased activity the winged insects which buzzed and flitted around me. Strange indeed are the impressions made upon our yet unstamped, unbiassed nature; and could we in every instance recall them, their history would be so unlike our more recent experience, as to make us suspect our personal identity. I do not remember any more recent feeling which corresponded in character and degree with this, whose