account to him of our conduct and
conversation. I thought of how many were aye complaining and
complaining, myself whiles among the rest, of the hardships, the
miseries, and the misfortunes of their lot; putting all down to the score
of fate, and never once thinking of the plantations of sorrow, reared up
from the seeds of our own sinfulness; or how any thing, save punishment,
could come of the breaking of the ten commandments delivered to the
patriarch Moses. Perhaps, reckoned I with myself, perhaps in this, even
I myself may have in this day's transactions erred. Here am I wandering
about in a cart; exposing myself to the defilement of the world, to the
fear of robbers, and to the night air, in the search of health for a
dwining laddie; as if the hand that dealt that blessing out was not as
powerful at home as it is abroad. Had I remained at my own lapbroad, the
profits of my day's work would have been over and above for the
maintenance of my family, outside and inside; instead of which, I have
been at the expense of a cart-hire and a horse's up-putting, let alone
Tammie's debosh and my own, besides the trifle of threepence to the round-
shouldered old horse-couper with the slouched japan beaver hat. The
story was too true a one; but, alack-a-day, it was now over late to
repent!

As I was thus musing, the bright red sun of summer sank down behind the
top of the Pentland Hills, and all looked bluish, dowie, and dreary, as
if the heart of the world had been seized with a sudden dwalm, and the
face of nature had at once withered from blooming youth into the
hoariness of old age. Now and then the birds gave a bit chitter; and
whiles a cow mooed from the fields; and the dew was falling like the
little tears of the fairies out of the blue lift, where the gloaming-star
soon began to glow and glitter bonnily.

What I had seen and witnessed made my thoughts heavy and my heart sad; I
could not get the better of it. I looked round and round me, as we
jogged along over the height, down on the far distant country, that
spread out as if it had been a great big picture, with hills, and fields,
and woods; and I could still see to the norward the ships lying at their
anchors on the sea, and the shores of Fife far far beyond it. It was a
great and a grand sight; and made me turn from the looking at it into my
own heart, causing me to think more and more of the glory of the Maker's
handiworks, and less and less of the littlene