nd as easily taken in, but
beloved and trusted and reverenced by all the little world about him.
I have known him as a farmer, and seen him sitting at the head of his
table in the farm kitchen, with his sons and daughters and men-servants
and women-servants about him, and, save for ribald gossip, no one of
whatever condition abridged the flow of talk for his presence. I have
known him as a parson, when he has been the father of his parish, the
patriarch of his people, the "ould angel" of all the hillside round
about. Such sweetness in his home life, such nobility, such gentle,
old-fashioned ceremoniousness, such delightful simplicity of manners.
Then when two of these "ould angels" met, two of these Parson Adamses,
living in content on seventy pounds a year, such high talk on great
themes, long hour after long hour in the little low-ceiled Vicarage
study, with no light but the wood fire, which glistened on the diamond
window-pane! And when midnight came seeing each other home, spending
half the night walking to and fro from Vicarage to Vicarage, or turning
out to saddle the horse in the field, but (far away "in wandering mazes
lost") going blandly up to the old cow and putting on the blinkers and
saying, "Here he is, sir." Have we anything like all this in England?
Their type is nearly extinct even in the Isle of Man, where they have
longest survived. And indeed they are not the only good things that are
dying out there.

LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS

The island has next to no literary associations, but it would be
unpardonable in a man of letters if he were to forget the few it can
boast. Joseph Train, our historian, made the acquaintance of Scott in
1814, and during the eighteen years following he rendered important
services to "The Great Unknown" as a collector of some of the legendary
stories used as foundations for what were then called the Scotch Novels.
But it is a common error that Train found the groundwork of the Manx
part of "Peveril of the Peak." It was Scott who directed Train to the
Isle of Man as a fine subject for study. Scott's brother Thomas lived
there, and no doubt this was the origin of Scott's interest in the
island. Scott himself never set foot on it. Wordsworth visited the
island about 1823, and he recorded his impressions in various sonnets,
and also in the magnificent lines on Peel Castle--"I was thy neighbour
once, thou rugged pile." He also had a relative living there--Miss
Hutchinson, his siste