bending over the open grave he saw the corpse lowered down and heard the earth falling hollow on the coffin-lid. But why dwell longer on the details of a story so mournful! The saddler, on his return to Nairn, found the widow in the delirium of a fever, from which she never recovered. Her younger son was seen in the West Indies ten years after, a miserable slave-driver, with a broken constitution and an unquiet mind. And there he died--no one caring where or how. I am not fond of melancholy stories; but “to purge the heart by pity and terror” is the true end of tragedy--an end which the gorgeous creations of the poets are not better suited to accomplish than the domestic tragedies which we see every day enacting around us. It is well, too, to note how immensely the folly and knavery of mankind add to the amount of human suffering; and how, according to the wise saying of the Preacher, “One sinner destroyeth much good.” CHAPTER XXVIII. “Alack-a-day! it was the school-house indeed; but, to be sure, sir, the squire has pulled it down, because it stood in the way of his prospects.”--MACKENZIE. [Sidenote: THE OLD SCHOOL AND WHAT IT PRODUCED.] The old school of Cromarty was situated in a retired little corner, behind the houses where the parish burying-ground bordered on the woods of the old castle. It was a low, mean-looking building, with its narrow latticed windows, which were half buried in the thatch, opening on the one side to the uncouth monuments of the churchyard, and on the other, through a straggling line of willows which fringed the little stream in front, to the ancient timeworn fortalice perched on the top of the hill. Mean, however, as it seemed--and certainly no public edifice could owe less to the architect--it formed one of Knox’s strongholds of the Reformation, and was erected by the united labours of the parishioners, agreeably to the scheme laid down in the First Book of Discipline, long previous to the Education Act of 1646. It had become an old building ere the Restoration, and fell into such disrepair during the reign of Episcopacy, that for a time it no longer sheltered the scholars. I find it enacted in the summer of 1682, by the Kirk-Session--for, curious as it may seem, even the curates in the north of Scotland had their kirk-sessions and their staffs of elders--that “the hail inhabitants of the burgh, especially masons and such as have horse, do repayre and bigg the samin in the wonted place, and that the folk upland do provide them with feal and diffiot.” And, in the true spirit of the reign of Charles II., a penalty of four pounds Scots enforced the enactment.