it afterwards she did not know, and, unconscious of the interest which might have attached to it, never thought of making any inquiry. There does not survive a single tradition of the circumstances which, in this part of the country, accompanied the great event that consigned the six chapels to solitude and decay. One may amuse one’s-self, however, in conceiving of the more interesting of these, and, with history and a little knowledge of human nature for one’s guide, run no great risk of conceiving amiss. The port of Cromarty was one of considerable trade for the age and country, and the people of the town were Lowland Scots. A more inquisitive race live nowhere. First there would come to them wild vague reports, by means of the seamen and merchants, of the strange doctrines which had begun to disturb the Continent and the sister kingdom. Shreds of heretic sermons would be whispered over their ale; and stories brought from abroad, of the impositions of the priests, would be eked out, in some instances with little corroborative anecdotes, the fruit of an experience acquired at home. For there were Liberals even then, though under another name;--a certain proportion of the people of Scotland being born such in every age of its independence. Then would come the story of the burning of good Patrick Hamilton, pensionary of the neighbouring abbey of Fearn; and everybody would be exceedingly anxious to learn the particular nature of his crime. Statements of new doctrines, and objections urged against some of the old, would in consequence be eagerly listened to, and as eagerly repeated. Then there would come among them two or three serious, grave people, natives of the place, who would have acquired, when pursuing their occupations in the south, as merchants or mechanics, a knowledge, not merely speculative, of the new religion. A traveller of a different cast would describe with much glee to groups of the younger inhabitants, the rare shows he had seen acted on the Castle-hill of Cupar; and producing a black-letter copy of “The Thrie Estaites” of Davy Lindsay, he would set all his auditors a-laughing at the expense of the Church. One of the graver individuals, though less openly, and to a more staid audience, would also produce a book, done into plain English, out of a very old tongue, by one Tyndale, and still more severe on the poor priests than even “The Thrie Estaites.” They would learn from this book that what they were beginning to deem a rational, but at the same time new religion, was in reality the old one; and that Popery, with all its boasted antiquity, was by far the more modern of the two. In the meantime, the priests of the chapels would be the angriest men in the parish;--denouncing against all and sundry the fire and fagots of this world, and the fire without fagots of the next; but one of them, a good honest man, neither the son of a churchman himself, nor yet burdened with a family of his own,