226 EDITOR. 



would have called the second sight, that long weary line of rail, with 

 its Sabbath travellers of pleasure and business speeding over it, and a 

 crowd of wretched witnesses raised, all unwittingly and unwillingly 

 on their own parts, to testify against it, and of coming judgment, at 

 both its ends. I see that the walks of the one great city into which 

 it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed artizans, and that the 

 lanes and alleys of the other number by thousands arid tens of thousands, 

 their pale and hunger-bitten operatives, that cry for work and food. 

 They testify all too surely that judgment needs no miracle here. Let 

 but the evil continue to grow, nay, let but one of our Scottish capitals, 

 our great mart of commerce and trade, sink into the circumstances 

 of its manufacturing neighbour Paisley, and the railway must keep its 

 Sabbaths. But, alas ! there would be no triumph for party in the case. 

 Great, ere the evil could befall, would the sufferings of the country be, 

 and they would be sufferings that would extend to all." What think 

 you, Allister, of the Catechist's note ? ' 



' Almost worth throwing into English/ I said. ' But the fog still 

 thickens, and it will be dark night ere we reach home.' And so we 

 parted. 



Dark night it was, and the storm had burst out. But it was pleas- 

 ant, when I had reached my little cottage, to pile high the fire on the 

 hearth, and to hear the blast roaring outside, and shaking the window 

 boards, as if some rude hand were striving in vain to unfasten them. 

 I lighted my little heap of moss-fir on the projecting stone, that serves 

 the poor Highlander for at once lamp and candlestick, and bent me 

 over your fourth page, to scan the Sabbath returns of a Scottish rail- 

 road. But rny rugged journey and the beating of the storm had in- 

 duced a degree of lassitude, the wind outside, too, had forced back 

 the smoke, until it had filled with a drowsy, umbery atmosphere the 

 whole of my dingy little apartment, Mr M'Neill seemed considerably 

 less smart than usual, and more than ordinarily offensive, and in the 

 middle of his speech I fell fast asleep. The scene changed, and I found 

 myself still engaged in my late journey, coming down over the hill, 

 just as the sun was setting red and lightless through the haze, behind 

 the dark Atlantic. The dreary prospect on which I had looked so 

 shortly before was restored in all its features ; there was the blank, 

 leaden-coloured sea, that seemed to mix all around with the blank, 

 leaden-coloured sky ; the moors spread out around me, brown and 

 barren, and studded with rock and stone ; the fogs, as they crept 

 downwards, were lowering the overtopping screen of hills behind to one 

 dead level. Through the landscape, otherwise so dingy and sombre, 

 there ran a long line of somewhat brighter hue, it was a long line of 

 breakers tumbling against the coast far as the eye could reach, and it 

 seemed interposed as a sort of selvage between the blank, leaden 

 sea, and the deep, melancholy russet of the land. Through one 

 of those changes so common in dreams, the continuous line of surf 

 seemed, as I looked, to alter its character. It winded no longer 

 around headland and bay, but stretched out through the centre of 



