existence—­an education not for time but for eternity.  To education like this, is indispensably necessary, as co-operating with schoolmasters and ministers of the gospel, the never-ceasing vigilance of parents; not so much exercised in superadding their pains to that of the schoolmaster or minister in teaching lessons or catechisms, or by enforcing maxims or precepts (though this part of their duty ought to be habitually kept in mind), but by care over their own conduct.  It is through the silent operation of example in their own well-regulated behaviour, and by accustoming their children early to the discipline of daily and hourly life, in such offices and employment as the situation of the family requires, and as are suitable to tender years, that parents become infinitely the most important tutors of their children, without appearing, or positively meaning to be so.  This education of circumstances has happily, in this district, not yet been much infringed upon by experimental novelties; parents here are anxious to send their offspring to those schools where knowledge substantially useful is inculcated, and those arts most carefully taught for which in after life there will be most need; this is especially true of the judgments of parents respecting the instruction of their daughters, which I know they would wish to be confined to reading, writing, and arithmetic, and plain needlework, or any other art favourable to economy and home-comforts.  Their shrewd sense perceives that hands full of employment, and a head not above it, afford the best protection against restlessness and discontent, and all the perilous temptations to which, through them, youthful females are exposed.  It is related of Burns, the celebrated Scottish poet, that once while in the company of a friend, he was looking from an eminence over a wide tract of country, he said, that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind that none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and worth which they contained.  How were those happy and worthy people educated?  By the influence of hereditary good example at home, and by their parochial schoolmasters opening the way for the admonitions and exhortations of their clergy; that was at a time when knowledge was perhaps better than now distinguished from smatterings of information, and when knowledge itself was more thought of in due subordination to wisdom.  How was the evening before the sabbath then spent by the families among which the poet was brought up?  He has himself told us in imperishable verse.  The Bible was brought forth, and after the father of the family had reverently laid aside, his bonnet, passages of scripture were read, and the poet thus describes what followed:—­