cies in
characters. The little early sketch written in June 1875, titled _Good
Content_, well illustrates this:

"Pleasure goes by piping: Hope unfurls his purple flag; and meek
Content follows them on a snow-white ass. Here, the broad sunlight
falls on open ways and goodly countries; here, stage by stage,
pleasant old towns and hamlets border the road, now with high sign-
poles, now with high minster spires; the lanes go burrowing under
blossomed banks, green meadows, and deep woods encompass them about;
from wood to wood flock the glad birds; the vane turns in the variable
wind; and as I journey with Hope and Pleasure, and quite a company of
jolly personifications, who but the lady I love is by my side, and
walks with her slim hand upon my arm?

"Suddenly, at a corner, something beckons; a phantom finger-post, a
will o' the wisp, a foolish challenge writ in big letters on a brand.
And twisting his red moustaches, braggadocio Virtue takes the perilous
way where dim rain falls ever, and sad winds sigh. And after him, on
his white ass, follows simpering Content.

"Ever since I walk behind these two in the rain. Virtue is all
a-cold; limp are his curling feather and fierce moustache. Sore
besmirched, on his jackass, follows Content."

The record, entitled _Sunday Thoughts_, which is dated some five days
earlier is naive and most characteristic, touched with the phantastic
moralities and suggestions already indicated in every sentence; and rises
to the fine climax in this respect at the close.

"A plague o' these Sundays! How the church bells ring up the sleeping
past! I cannot go in to sermon: memories ache too hard; and so I hide
out under the blue heavens, beside the small kirk whelmed in leaves.
Tittering country girls see me as I go past from where they sit in the
pews, and through the open door comes the loud psalm and the fervent
solitary voice of the preacher. To and fro I wander among the graves,
and now look over one side of the platform and see the sunlit meadow
where the grown lambs go bleating and the ewes lie in the shadow under
their heaped fleeces; and now over the other, where the rhododendrons
flower fair among the chestnut boles, and far overhead the chestnut
lifts its thick leaves and spiry blossom into the dark-blue air. Oh,
the height and depth and thickness of the chestnut foliage! Oh, to
have