And if the time of these symposial meetings had been somewhat later in the century, how much more formidable would have been a passage through this contracted valley of tumuli and bones! No churchyard, except those of Judea, was ever invested with such terrors--not the mystical fears of a divine fate seen in the descending cloud, with Justice gleaming with fiery eyes on Sin, and holding those scales, the decision of which would destine to eternal bliss or eternal woe, and that Justice personified in Him "whose glory is a burning like the burning of a fire,"--no, but the revolting fears produced by the profanity of that poor worm of very common mud, which has been since the beginning of time acting the God. Ay, the aurelia-born image of grace sees a difference when it looks from the sun to the epigenetic thing which He raises out of corruption. There was, in that small place of skulls, a rehearsal of the great day. We hear little of these freaks now-a-days; but it was different then, when men made themselves demons by drink. One night William Maule of Panmure, then in his days of graceless frolic; Fletcher Read, the nephew of the laird, and subsequently the laird himself, of Logie; Rob Thornton, the merchant, Dudhope, and other kindred spirits, who used to sing in the inn of Sandy Morren, the hotel-keeper, "Death begone, here's none but souls," sallied drunk from the inn. The story goes that the night was dark, and there stood at the door a hearse, which had that day conveyed to the "howf," now about to be shut up because of its offence against the nostrils of men who are not destined to need a grave, the wife of an inconsolable husband and the mother of children; and thereupon came from Maule's mouth--for wickedness will seek its playful function in a pun--the proposition that the bacchanals should have a rehearsal in the kirkyard of Logie. Well, it signified, of course, nothing that the Black Princess had been buried there, so far away from the land of "the balmy East," "Where the roses blow and the oranges grow, And all is divine but man below."