d recognise only disaster in
it, not judgment. I see at times, with a distinctness that my father
would have called the second sight, that long weary line of rail, with
its Sabbath travellers of pleasure and business speeding over it, and
a crowd of wretched witnesses raised, all unwittingly and unwillingly
on their own parts, to testify against it, and of coming judgment, at
both its ends. I see that the walks of the one great city into which
it opens are blackened by shoals of unemployed artisans; and that the
lanes and alleys of the other number by thousands and tens of
thousands their pale and hunger-bitten operatives, that cry for work
and food. They testify all too surely that judgment needs no miracle
here. Let but the evil continue to grow--nay, let but one of our
Scottish capitals, our great mart of commerce and trade sink into the
circumstances of its manufacturing neighbour Paisley--and the railway
_must_ keep its Sabbaths. But alas! there would be no triumph for
party in the case. Great, ere the evil could befall, would the
sufferings of the country be, and they would be sufferings that would
extend to all." What think you, Allister, of the catechist's note?'

'Almost worth throwing into English,' I said. 'But the fog still
thickens, and it will be dark night ere we reach home.' And so we
parted.

Dark night it was, and the storm had burst out. But it was pleasant,
when I had reached my little cottage, to pile high the fire on the
hearth, and to hear the blast roaring outside, and shaking the
window-boards, as if some rude hand were striving to unfasten them. I
lighted my little heap of moss fir on the projecting stone that serves
the poor Highlander for at once lamp and candlestick, and bent me over
your fourth page, to scan the Sabbath returns of a Scottish railroad.
But my rugged journey and the beating of the storm had induced a
degree of lassitude; the wind outside, too, had forced back the smoke,
until it had filled with a drowsy, umbery atmosphere, the whole of my
dingy little apartment: Mr. M'Neill seemed considerably less smart
than usual, and more than ordinarily offensive, and in the middle of
his speech I fell fast asleep. The scene changed, and I found myself
still engaged in my late journey, coming down over the hill, just as
the sun was setting red and lightless through the haze behind the dark
Atlantic. The dreary prospect on which I had looked so shortly before
was restored in all its feat