UNHAPPY DOMESTIC EXPERIENCES. 6 1 



conduct, which gained full consent. When another sym- 

 pathetic friend had occasion to mention that he had 

 known it for forty years, the old man, who thought him 

 quite ignorant of it, fairly broke down, as if stabbed to the 

 heart. To the last, he could never refer to it without the 

 acutest pain. When, in talking to him of his history 

 shortly before his death, I delicately referred to his un- 

 happy domestic life, he touched on the subject with difficulty, 

 saying, amongst other things, that " when a man has a bad 

 nee'bor, that will listen to nothing, he's glad to get clear 

 o' her." Referring to her death, he said it caused him 

 grief even after all that had happened ; and the memory 

 of the bitter past reviving as he spoke, he turned away 

 with tears in his eyes, deprecating further reference to it, 

 by saying, " But ye see, that's a' by noo ! " 



These distressing experiences in the tenderest relations, 

 which touch the deepest springs of our being with strange 

 power, might have had disastrous effects, at least on his 

 temper and disposition. That they did not vitiate his 

 habits by driving him to excess in search of consolation 

 is highly honourable to his moral power. They might, 

 however, have made him ill-tempered and more or less 

 misanthropic and morose, and it speaks volumes in the 

 man's favour that they did not ; though his temperament 

 was naturally keen and sensitive, and felt such troubles 

 to the very core. 



What rendered the grief under which he suffered the 

 harder to bear, was the fact that it was not dead that its 

 heartless cause lived so long and, for more than twenty 

 years, wandered in the very district in which he dwelt, before 

 the public eye and with no guarded tongue, in a guise 



