a
village-school on a fine summer evening. The buoyant spirit of childhood,
repressed with so much difficulty during the tedious hours of discipline,
may then be seen to explode, as it were, in shout, and song, and frolic,
as the little urchins join in groups on their play-ground, and arrange
their matches of sport for the evening. But there is one individual who
partakes of the relief afforded by the moment of dismission, whose
feelings are not so obvious to the eye of the spectator, or so apt to
receive his sympathy. I mean the teacher himself, who, stunned with the
hum, and suffocated with the closeness of his school-room, has spent the
whole day (himself against a host) in controlling petulance, exciting
indifference to action, striving to enlighten stupidity, and labouring to
soften obstinacy; and whose very powers of intellect have been confounded
by hearing the same dull lesson repeated a hundred times by rote, and
only varied by the various blunders of the reciters. Even the flowers of
classic genius, with which his solitary fancy is most gratified, have
been rendered degraded, in his imagination, by their connexion with
tears, with errors, and with punishment; so that the Eclogues of Virgil
and Odes of Horace are each inseparably allied in association with the
sullen figure and monotonous recitation of some blubbering school-boy. If
to these mental distresses are added a delicate frame of body, and a mind
ambitious of some higher distinction than that of being the tyrant of
childhood, the reader may have some slight conception of the relief which
a solitary walk, in the cool of a fine summer evening, affords to the
head which has ached, and the nerves which have been shattered, for so
many hours, in plying the irksome task of public instruction.

"To me these evening strolls have been the happiest hours of an unhappy
life; and if any gentle reader shall hereafter find pleasure in perusing
these lucubrations, I am not unwilling he should know, that the plan of
them has been usually traced in those moments, when relief from toil and
clamour, combined with the quiet scenery around me, has disposed my mind
to the task of composition.

"My chief haunt, in these hours of golden leisure, is the banks of the
small stream, which, winding through a 'lone vale of green bracken,'
passes in front of the village school-house of Gandercleugh. For the
first quarter of a mile, perhaps, I may be disturbed from my meditations,
i