A Sunday at the sea-side, or as Scotch people prefer calling it, a Sabbath, is an enjoyable thing.  The steamers that come down on Saturday evening are crammed to the last degree.  Houses which are already fuller than they can hold, receive half-a-dozen new inmates,—­how stowed away we cannot even imagine.  We cannot but reject as apocryphal the explanation of a Glasgow tout, that on such occasions poles are projected from the upper windows, upon which young men of business roost until the morning.  Late walks, and the spooniest of flirtations characterize the Saturday evening.  Every one, of course, goes to church on Sunday morning; no Glasgow man who values his character durst stop away.  We shall not soon forget the beauty of the calm Sunday on that beautiful shore:  the shadows of the distant mountains; the smooth sea; the church-bells, faintly heard from across the water; the universal turning-out of the population to the house of prayer, or rather of preaching.  It was almost too much for us to find Dr. Gumming here before us, giving all his old brilliancies to enraptured multitudes.  We had hoped he was four hundred and odd miles off; but we resigned ourselves, like the Turk, to what appears an inevitable destiny.  This gentleman, we felt, is really one of the institutions of the country, and no more to be escaped than the income-tax.

Morning service over, most people take a walk.  This would have been regarded in Scotland a few years since as a profanation of the day.  But there is a general air of quiet; people speak in lower tones; there are no joking and laughing.  And the Frith, so covered with steamers on week-days, is to-day unruffled by a single paddle-wheel.  Still it is a mistake to fancy that a Scotch Sunday is necessarily a gloomy thing.  There are no excursion trains, no pleasure trips in steamers, no tea-gardens open:  but it is a day of quiet domestic enjoyment, not saddened but hallowed by the recognized sacredness of the day.  The truth is, the feeling of the sanctity of the Sabbath is so ingrained into the nature of most Scotchmen by their early training, that they could not enjoy Sunday pleasuring.  Their religious sense, their superstition if you choose, would make them miserable on a Sunday excursion.

The Sunday morning service is attended by a crowded congregation:  the church is not so full in the afternoon.  In some places there is evening service, which is well attended.  We shall not forget one pleasant walk, along a quiet road bounded by trees as rich and green as though they grew in Surrey, though the waves were lapping on the rocks twenty yards off, and the sun was going down behind the mountains of Cowal, to a pretty little chapel where we attended evening worship upon our last Sunday on the Clyde.