they still carried, to the annoyance and anger of all their serene-minded neighbours, such a Slough of Despond in their anxious minds.  This was why sin so poisoned all their possessions and enjoyments that Greatheart could not get Fearing, any more than Rutherford could get Gordon, out of the Valley of Humiliation.  And this was why Gordon so often turned upon Rutherford when he was exalted above measure, and reminded his minister, in the old Scottish proverb, that ‘Hall-binks are slippery.’  Seats of honour, Mr. Samuel, are unsafe seats for unsanctified sinners.  Ecstasies do not last, and they leave the soul weaker and darker than they found it.  It is a comely thing even for a saint to be well-clothed about with humility, and the deepest valley is safer and seemlier walking for a lame man than the mountain-top; and so on, till Rutherford admitted that Robert Gordon’s warnings were neither impertinent nor untimeous.  The sin-stricken laird of Knockbrex was like Mr. Fearing at the House Beautiful.  When all the other pilgrims sat down without fear at the table, that so timid and so troublesome pilgrim, remembering the proverb, stole away behind the screen and found his meat and his drink in overhearing the good conversation that went on in the banquet-hall.  Gordon could not understand all Rutherford’s joy.  He did not altogether like it.  He did not answer the ecstatic letters so promptly as he answered those which were composed on a soberer key.  He was a blunt, plain-spoken, matter-of-fact man; he immensely loved and honoured his minister, but he could not help reminding him after one of his specially enraptured letters that ‘Hall-binks are slippery seats.’  The golden mean lay somewhere between the hall-bink and the ash-pit; somewhere between Rutherford’s ecstasy and Gordon’s depression.  But as the Guide said in the exquisite conversation, the wise God will have it so, some must pipe and some must weep:  and, for my part, I care not for that profession that begins not with heaviness of mind.  Only, here was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing and Robert Gordon, that they would play upon no other music but this to their latter end.  So much so, that the thick woods of Knockbrex are said to give out to this day the sound of the sackbut to those who have their ears set to such music; there are men in that country who say that they still hear it when they pass the plantations of Knockbrex alone at night.  Knockbrex is now a fine modern mansion that is sometimes let for the summer to city people seeking solitude and rest.  Among these thick woods and along these silent sands Samuel Rutherford and Robert Gordon were wont to walk and talk together.  And here still a man who wishes it may be free from the noise and the hurrying of this life.  Here a man shall not be let and hindered in his contemplations as in other places he is apt to be.  There are woods here that he who loves a pilgrim’s life may safely walk in.  The soil also all hereabouts