racter of
her descendant. The nobility of the humble family from which he sprung
was derived evidently from this source. That character, to borrow a
homely but forcible metaphor from Burns, was the sustaining 'stalk of
carle hemp' which bore it up and kept it from grovelling on the
depressed level of its condition. How very interesting a subject of
thought and inquiry! A little Highland girl, when tending cattle in the
fields nearly a century ago, was led, through divine grace, to
'apprehend the mercy of God in Christ,' and to close with His free
offers of salvation; and in the third generation we can see the effects
of the transaction, not only in the blameless life and the pure
sentiments of a true though humble poet, but in, also, the manly
vigour of his thinking, and the high degree of culture which he was
enabled to bestow on his intellectual faculties.

The story of Annie M'Donald is such an one as a poet of Wordsworth's
cast would delight to tell. She was born in a remote and thinly
inhabited district of the Highlands, and lost her father, a Highland
crofter, while yet an infant. She was his youngest child, but the
other members of the family were all very young and helpless; and her
poor mother, a woman still in the prime of life, had to wander with
them into the low country, friendless and penniless, in quest of
employment. And employment after a weary pilgrimage she at length
succeeded in procuring from a hospitable farmer in the parish of
Kilmany, in Fifeshire. An unoccupied hovel furnished her with a home;
and here, with hard labour, she reared her children, till they were
fitted to leave her one by one, and do something for themselves,
chiefly in the way of herding cattle. Annie grew up to be employed
like the rest; and when a little herd-girl in the fields, 'she
frequently fell into strains of serious meditation,' says her
biographer, 'on the works of God, and on her own standing before Him.'
Let scepticism assert what it may, such is the nature of man. God has
written on every human heart the great truth of man's responsibility;
and the simple, ignorant herd-girl could read it there, amid the
solitude of the fields. But the inscription seemed fraught with
terror: she was perplexed by alternate doubts and fears, and troubled
by wildly vivid imaginings during the day, and by frightful dreams by
night. Her mother had been unable to send her to school, but she got
occasional lessons in the evenings from a fe