Have you ever read the “Life of Mansie Wauch, Tailor in Dalkeith,” by that pleasing poet and most amiable man, the late David Macbeth Moir?  I have been looking into it lately; and I have regretted much that the Lowland Scotch dialect is so imperfectly understood in England, and that even where so far understood its raciness is so little felt; for great as is the popularity of that work, it is much less known than it deserves to be.  Only a Scotchman can thoroughly appreciate it.  It is curious, and yet it is not curious, to find the pathos and the polish of one of the most touching and elegant of poets in the man who has with such irresistible humor, sometimes approaching to the farcical, delineated humble Scotch life.  One passage in the book always struck me very much.  We have in it the poet as well as the humorist and it is a perfect example of what I have been trying to describe in the pages which you have read.  I mean the passage in which Mansie tells us of a sudden glimpse which, in circumstances of mortal terror, he once had of the future.  On a certain “awful night” the tailor was awakened by cries of alarm, and, looking out, he saw the next house to his own was on fire from cellar to garret.  The earnings of poor Mansie’s whole life were laid out on his stock in trade and his furniture, and it appeared likely that these would be at once destroyed.

“Then,” says he, “the darkness of the latter days came over my spirit like a vision before the prophet Isaiah; and I could see nothing in the years to come but beggary and starvation,—­myself a fallen-back old man, with an out-at-the-elbows coat, a greasy hat, and a bald brow, hirpling over a staff, requeeshting an awmous; Nanse a broken-hearted beggar-wife, torn down to tatters, and weeping like Rachel when she thought on better days; and poor wee Benjie going from door to door with a meal-pock on his back.”

Ah, there is exquisite pathos there, as well as humor; but the thing for which I have quoted that sentence is its startling truthfulness.  You have all done what Mansie Wauch did, I know.  Every one has his own way of doing it, and it is his own especial picture which each sees; but there has appeared to us, as to Mansie, (I must recur to my old figure,) as it were a sudden rift in the clouds that conceal the future, and we have seen the way, far ahead,—­the dusty way,—­and an aged pilgrim pacing slowly along it; and in that aged figure we have each recognized our own young self.  How often have I sat down on the mossy wall that surrounded my churchyard, when I had more time for reverie than I have now,—­sat upon the mossy wall, under a great oak, whose branches came low down and projected far out,—­and looked at the rough gnarled bark, and at the pacing river, and at the belfry of the little church, and there and then thought of Mansie Wauch and of his vision of Future Years!  How often in these hours, or in long solitary walks and rides among the hills,