his wife. During the whole of the preceding day, the unfortunate woman had been seen from the opposite shore, flitting around the cottage like an unhappy ghost; during the whole of the preceding night had she watched alone by the dead. The coffin lay beside the door; the corpse in the middle of the apartment.--Never shall I forget the scene which I witnessed from the old chapel of St. Regulus on the evening of the following Sabbath. It was one of those lovely evenings which we so naturally associate with ideas of human enjoyment; when, from some sloping eminence, we look over the sunlit woods, fields, and cottages, of a wide extent of country, and dream that the inhabitants are as happy as the scene is beautiful. The sky was without a cloud, and the sea without a wrinkle. The rocks and sandhills on the opposite shore lay glistening in the sun, each with its deep patch of shadow resting by its side; and the effect of the whole, compared with the aspect which it had presented a few hours before, was as if it had been raised on its groundwork of sea and sky from the low to the high relief of the sculptor. There were boats drawn up on the beach, and a line of houses behind; but where were the inhabitants? No smoke rose from the chimneys; the doors and windows were fast closed; not one solitary lounger sauntered about the harbour or the shore; the inanity of death and desertion pervaded the whole scene. Suddenly, however, the eye caught a little dark speck moving hurriedly along the road which leads to the ferry. It was a man on horseback. He reached the cottages of the boatmen, and flung himself from his horse; but no one came at his call to row him across. He unloosed a skiff from her moorings, and set himself to tug at the oar. The skiff flew athwart the bay. The watchmen stationed on the shore of Cromarty moved down to prevent her landing. There was a loud cry passed from man to man; a medical gentleman came running to the beach, he leapt into the skiff, and laying hold of an oar as if he were a common boatman, she again shot across the bay. A case of cholera had just occurred in the parish of Nigg. I never before felt so strongly the force of contrast. There is a wild poem of the present age which presents the reader with a terrible picture of a cloak of utter darkness spread over the earth, and the whole race of man perishing beneath its folds, like insects of autumn in the chills of a night of October. There is another modern poem, less wild, but not less sublime, in which we see, as in a mirror of a magician, the sun dying in the heavens, and the evening of an eternal night closing around the last of our species. I trust I am able in some degree to appreciate the merits of both; and yet, since witnessing the scene which I have so feebly attempted to describe, I am led to think that the earth, if wholly divested of its inhabitants, would present a more melancholy aspect, should it still retain its fertility and beauty, than if wrapped up in