'Keeping its Sabbaths,' replied Eachen; 'ay, but the shareholders, perhaps, have little choice in the matter. I wish you heard our catechist on that. Depend on't, Allister, the country's _fey_.' 'Keeping its Sabbaths? Yes,' said I, catching at his meaning, 'if we are to be visited by a permanent commercial depression--and there are many things less likely at the present time--the railway _may_ keep its Sabbaths, and keep them as the land of Judea did of old. It would be all too easy, in a period of general distress, to touch that line of necessarily high expenditure below which it would be ruin for the returns of the undertaking to fall. Let but the invariably great outlay continue to exceed the income for any considerable time, and the railway _must_ keep its Sabbaths.' 'Just the catechist's idea,' rejoined my cousin. 'He spoke on the subject at our last meeting. "Eachen," he said, "Eachen, the thing lies so much in the ordinary course of providence, that our blinded Sabbath-breakers, were it to happen, would recognise only disaster in it, not judgment. I see at times, with a distinctness that my father would have called the second sight, that long weary line of rail, with its Sabbath travellers of pleasure and business speeding over it, and a crowd of wretched witnesses raised, all unwittingly and unwillingly on their own parts, to testify against it, and of coming judgment, at both its ends. I see that the walks of the one great city into which it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed artisans; and that the lanes and alleys of the other number by thousands and tens of thousands their pale and hunger-bitten operatives, that cry for work and food. They testify all too surely that judgment needs no miracle here. Let but the evil continue to grow--nay, let but one of our Scottish capitals, our great mart of commerce and trade sink into the circumstances of its manufacturing neighbour Paisley--and the railway _must_ keep its Sabbaths. But alas! there would be no triumph for party in the case. Great, ere the evil could befall, would the sufferings of the country be, and they would be sufferings that would extend to all." What think you, Allister, of the catechist's note?' 'Almost worth throwing into English,' I said. 'But the fog still thickens, and it will be dark night ere we reach home.' And so we parted.