The progress of character is fully as interesting a study as the progress of art; and both are curiously exemplified in the history of Donald Miller. Now that he had conquered his enemy, and might realize his long-cherished dream of unbroken leisure, he found that constant employment had, through the force of habit, become essential to his comfort. His garden was the very paragon of gardens; and a single glance was sufficient to distinguish his furrow of potatoes from every other furrow in the field; but, now that his main occupation was gone, much time hung on his hands, notwithstanding his attentions to both. First, he set himself to build a wall quite round his property; and a very neat one he did build; but unfortunately, when once erected, there was nothing to knock it down again. Then he whitewashed his house, and built a new sty for his pig, the walls of which he also whitewashed. Then he enclosed two little patches on the side of the stream, to serve as bleaching-greens. Then he covered the upper part of his bulwark with a layer of soil, and sowed it with grass. Then he repaired a well, the common property of the town. Then he constructed a path for foot-passengers on the side of a road, which, passing his garden on the south, leads to Cromarty House. His labours for the good of the public were wretchedly recompensed, by, at least, his more immediate neighbours. They would dip their dirty pails into the well which he had repaired, and tell him, when he hinted at the propriety of washing them, that they were no dirtier than they used to be. Their pigs would break into his bleaching-greens, and furrow up the sward with their snouts: and when he threatened to pound them, he would be told “how unthriving a thing it was to keep the puir brutes aye in the fauld,” and how impossible a thing “to watch them ilka time they gae’d out.” Herd-boys would gallop their horses and drive their cattle along the path which he had formed for foot-passengers exclusively: and when he stormed at the little fellows, they would canter past, and shout out, from what they deemed a safe distance, that their “horses and kye had as good a right to the road as himsel’.” Worse than all the rest, when he had finished whitening the walls of his pigsty, and gone in for a few minutes to the house, a mischievous urchin, who had watched his opportunity, sallied across the bridge, and, seizing on the brush, whitewashed the roof also. Independent of the insult, nothing could be in worse taste; and yet, when the poor man preferred his complaint to the father of the urchin, the boor only deigned to mutter in reply, that “folk would hae nae peace till three Lammas tides, joined intil ane, would come and roll up the _Clach Malacha_” (it weighs about twenty tons) “frae its place i’the sea till flood watermark.” The fellow, rude as he was, had sagacity enough to infer that a tide potent enough to roll up the _Clach Malacha_, would demolish the bulwark, and