,
the sober tinge of our Presbyterian blue. Like the cloak of Asmodeus,
it was covered over with figures. In one corner we could see the
General Assembly done in miniature, and Mr. Clark rising among the
members like Gulliver in Lilliput, to move against the deposition of
the seven ministers of Strathbogie. In another the same reverend
gentleman, drawn on the same large scale, was just getting on his
legs at a political dinner, to denounce his old friends and allies
the Evangelicals, as wild destructives, 'engaged in urging on the fall
of the Establishment, in the desperation of human pride.' Here we
could see him baptizing the child of a person who, as he had fallen
out of church-going habits, could get it baptized nowhere else; there
examined in his presbytery for the offence with closed doors; yonder
writing letters to the newspapers on the subject, to say that, if he
_had_ baptized the man's child, it was all because the man was, like
himself, a good hater of forced settlements. There were a great many
other vignettes besides; and the last in the series was the scene
enacted at the late Inverness Presbytery, when Mr. Clark rose to
congratulate his old associates, in all the stern severity of
consistent virtue, on the facile and '_squeezable_' character of their
representative for the Assembly.

The conjurer came out into an open space, drew a circle around him,
and then began to build up on the sward two little human figures
about three feet high, as boys build up figures of snow at the
commencement of a thaw. Harlequin performs a somewhat similar feat in
one of the pantomimes. He first sets up two carrots on end, to
serve for legs; balances on them the head of a large cabbage, to serve
for a body; sticks on two other carrots, to serve for arms; places a
round turnip between them, to serve for a head; gives the crazy
erection a blow with his lath sword, and straightway off it stalks, a
vegetable man. Mr. Clark had, in like manner, no sooner built up his
figures, than, with a peculiarly bland air, and in tones of the
softest liquidity, he whispered into the ear of the one, Be you a
Convocationist, and into that of the other, Be you a Moderate; and
then with his charmed rod he tapped them across the shoulders, and set
them a-walking. The creatures straightway jerked up their little
heads to the angle of his face, bowed like a brace of automaton
dancing-masters, and after pacing round his knees for a few
seconds, beg