ed, in the best house on the right-hand
side,--the house with a hewn front, and a shop in it. He kept the shop,
and was the owner of the house, and had another house besides, and was
one of the elders of the Free Church in Urquhart. Such was the standing
of my old acquaintance the journeyman mason of twenty-three years ago.
He had been, when I knew him, a steady, industrious, religious
man,--with but one exception the only contributor to missionary and
Bible societies among a numerous party of workmen; and he was now
occupying a respectable place in his village, and was one of the voters
of the county. Let Chartism assert what it pleases on the one hand, and
Toryism what it may on the other, the property-qualification of the
Reform Bill is essentially a good one for such a country as Scotland. In
our cities it no doubt extends the political franchise to a fluctuating
class, ill hafted in society, who possess it one year and want it
another; but in our villages and smaller towns it hits very nearly the
right medium for forming a premium on steady industry and character, and
for securing that at least the mass of those who possess it should be
sober-minded men, with a stake in the general welfare. In running over
the histories of the various voters in one of our smaller towns, I found
that nearly one-half of the whole had, like my old comrade at Conon
Bridge, acquired for themselves, through steady and industrious habits,
the qualification from which they derive their vote. My companion failed
to recognize in the man turned of forty the smooth-cheeked stripling of
eighteen, with whom he had wrought so long before. I soon succeeded,
however, in making good my claim to his acquaintance. He had previously
established the identity of the editor of his newspaper with his quondam
fellow-workman, and a single link more was all the chain wanted. We
talked over old matters for half an hour. His wife, a staid respectable
matron, who, when I had been last in the district, was exactly such a
person as her eldest daughter, showed me an Encyclopaedia, with colored
prints, which she wished to send, if she knew but how, to the Free
Church library. I walked with him through his garden, and saw trees
loaded with yellow-cheeked pippins, where I had once seen only
unproductive heath, that scantily covered a barren soil of ferruginous
sand, and unwillingly declining an invitation to wait tea,--for a
previous engagement interfered,--I took leave