e angered, but an honest,
warm-hearted chield for a' that; an' there's mair sense in yon big head
o' his, than in ony ither twa in the country."

"Can you tell me aught," said the north country gentleman, addressing my
companion, "of Mr. R----, the chapel minister in K----? I was once one
of his pupils in the far north; but I have heard nothing of him since he
left Cromarty."

"Why," rejoined the old man, "he's just the man that, mair nor a' the
rest, has borne the brunt o' Robert's fearsome waggery. Did ye ken him
in Cromarty, say ye?"

"He was parish schoolmaster there," said the gentleman, "for twelve
years; and for six of these I attended his school. I cannot help
respecting him; but no one ever loved him. Never surely was there a man
at once so unequivocally honest and so thoroughly unamiable."

"You must have found him a rigid disciplinarian," I said.

"He was the most so," he replied, "from the days of Dionysius, at least,
that ever taught a school. I remember there was a poor fisher boy among
us named Skinner, who, as is customary in Scottish schools, as you must
know, blew the horn for gathering the scholars, and kept the catalogue
and the key; and who, in return, was educated by the master, and
received some little gratuity from the scholars besides. On one
occasion, the key dropped out of his pocket; and, when school-time came,
the irascible dominie had to burst open the door with his foot. He raged
at the boy with a fury so insane, and beat him so unmercifully, that the
other boys, gathering heart in the extremity of the case, had to rise
_en masse_ and tear him out of his hands. But the curious part of the
story is yet to come: Skinner has been a fisherman for the last twelve
years; but never has he been seen disengaged, for a moment, from that
time to this, without mechanically thrusting his hand into the key
pocket."

Our companion furnished us with two or three other anecdotes of Mr.
R----. He told us of a lady who was so overcome by sudden terror on
unexpectedly seeing him, many years after she had quitted his school, in
one of the pulpits of the south, that she fainted away; and of another
of his scholars, named M'Glashan, a robust, daring fellow of six feet,
who, when returning to Cromarty from some of the colonies, solaced
himself by the way with thoughts of the hearty drubbing with which he
was to clear off all his old scores with the dominie.

"Ere his return, however," continued the gentle