sincere. Nor were they
otherwise; but the value of the sincerity of the intemperate and the
immoral, what is it?

"Ashes within beautiful fruit."

William Riddell passed the whole of his examinations, and was, as the
students say, "ready for a church." Nor was he long in procuring one.
Among the friends to whom his genius and character had recommended him
was a nobleman, who had the gift of the very kirk to which William and
his father had been accustomed to resort. The incumbent died; the
nobleman presented the living to William. With the new duties which
now devolved upon him, came a crowd of new feelings and springs of
action. He gave up his engagement with the literary periodical, he
retired from his social companions, and he devoted himself to grave
and worthy study and contemplation. The struggle was severe; but he
bore up against it under the excitement of the new responsibility
which had fallen upon him. He went down to the country with some of
the most distinguished members of the Scottish Church, who officiated
at his ordination. A proud, a tumultuously happy day was it for old
David Riddell, who, with wonder and awe, felt his horny hand grasped
by the great men whose very names he had considered subservient to his
happiness of old time, and beheld his son, little William, the boy
whom he had taught the alphabet upon Scaurhope Hill, with the pebbles
that lie there--beheld him holding high discourse with these same
dignitaries, saw that his opinions were listened to with respect, and
that his thoughts, according as they were solemn or ludicrous, were
responded to by these great men with gravity or broad grins. A
delightful day was it to the old shepherd, as he beheld the first man
in the General Assembly--the greatest man in the Scottish Kirk--lay
his hand upon the youthful head of his beloved son, and consecrate him
to the care of the souls who dwelt in the very valley where he had
been born and reared, in which his genius was known, and his family,
though humble, respected.

There was another, and an equally strong reason, for William's giving
up his convivial habits and boisterous companions. He was in love.

It was at that least romantic of all places for a lover, a ball in
Edinburgh, that William Riddell, the new pastor of Mosskirk, had first
met Ellen Ogilvie, the daughter of the principal heritor of his
parish, the owner of the hills on which his father had watched the
sheep for above threescore