right or not I can't exactly say, as my own memory does not reach the hog-score of so remote a tee. But this I will say, that a bolder clearer fortnight, with here and there a stringent night that might have turned the Watery King of the Tee-totallers into a pillar of ice, I never rejoiced to live through. The passion for ice here is as keen as the ice itself. Everybody curls, or skates, or slides; nor do we miss the pikestaff, so plain in the simile. At the skreigh-o'-day,

"When hens begin to mutter on the bauks,"

the Village schoolboy, rubbing his eyes, demands of his early dad if the ice will bear, and jumping at the affirmative, however grudgingly given, fumbles his shivering way into his thin corduroys, dons his leather-heeled stockings, and clatters forth in his clogs; his unkempt half-starved hair, unconscious of Macassar, standing out on his head like the ill-conditioned coat of a lean, farrow, family cow, hide-bound on dry fodder, as she comes forth to water at the frosty reeking well, not unbesmirched from the dropping outskirts of the hen-roost in the byre. The icicle at the thatched eaves gives him the first assurance of the frost; he plucks a pillar, and shaking the discoloured drop from its nose, engendered from the dirty rotten thatch, he sucks away at his barley-sugar, hoarsely cracking and braying with his heel the curious white ice, waved and wrought like a pale Scotch pebble, in every horse-foot print in the gnarled road, to try its strength and quality, and guess if the more distant slide will bear. Porridgestrengthened, he has an hour at the old quarry-hole before the school goes in; and the dismissal at the droop of day sends him to the remoter cauld; not forgetting, however, to fetch a circuit by the mill, to thrust his hands into the happer for a gowpen of groats, or lie half an hour in the seedy killogie with the fire-feeding kilnman, if perchance he may vouchsafe him a roasted potato. Then off to the ice is he till all the stars be out; nor crunches he the crisp spangles of the frosty meadows with his homewardhieing feet, till the cow-horn of the Village has blown

supper-time. Nor is this the last of him for the day. We catch another glimpse of the little rogue, as with halfpenny candle depending from his fore-finger-end, according to the graphic picture of Cowper, he takes every yard-long slide on his way home along the street, till, trying it on one foot, down he comes with a whack, and crushes little dippie into a thousand clots; then gathering himself up, makes the most of his limping leg to cover the disaster of the candle, and roars his way home, and is packed off to bed for his pains by the light of a spunk. But let us not be too hard on the little dog. His elders and betters like the ice as well as he. The thatcher on the north side of the frosty house—the coldest object in creation—clanks his arms on his sides at the foot of his ladder, to raise a glow; looks wistfully up at his unshaven work; and bears aloft on his poised head a batch of rimy divots, like a bee-skep, which it will be death to manipulate. But now the wind ruffling his unfinished straw takes him so snelly by the nose, that he is fain to look over his shoulder at half-a-dozen roistering masons, red from the quarry, who, glorying in the happy idleness of impossible work in such weather, are on their way to the loch, and call him to come down. Half shaking him from his ladder, as he sticks his knife deep in the thatch, they have him off with them at last, blinking the evening certainty of his wife's displeasure. But what is he worse than others? The shoemaker's wax won't work, and what can Crispin do but curl? The tailor has left his carpet shoes, and is out upon tramps; true to his profession, the butcher nicks the hog; and the cadger breaks a metaphorical egg. "In days o' frost," says the song

"In days o' frost, wi' writer chiels

Ae letter does for twa;

And doctors let their patients live
Until it comes a thaw."

So writers and doctors are there too, and eke the minister; and thus the poor thatcher's apology is made up, as turned to the orange-tawny west, where the horizon, steaming as with hot discoloured sand, foretells a morrow

of still intenser frost, he soberly reflects his way homeward to his wife, and at last ventures to whistle. But, alas for him! his wife has no dinner for him-how can she have? Snatching a bannock to munch at his leisure, he is off from her in a pet, and away to the smithy, the evening howf of the choice spirits of the Village. The white and ruddy gleam of the keen, frost-fed, frizzled flame, edged with sulphurous blue, dazzles him as he opens the two halves of the door; shines on a dozen advertisements snugly fixed on the upper half with the bent tips of horsenails, the refuse of shoeing; and brings out in interesting chiaro-scuro the black rafters far back, where the remnant wings of what were once owls, and bats, and swallows, hang nailed and extended. Vulcan is bowing away and crooning at his handle tipped with smooth cow-horn turned upwards, and watching two be-spectacled seniors playing at draughts on the hearth. Here a knot of masons are vastly improving upon the rink of the day. There a set of chaps are at Blind-Harry, ready each in his turn to lend a hand at the fore-hammer, till the finished horse-shoe is flung hissing and hollow-thundering into the bubbling trough. Yonder is a little fellow in the corner, as yet innocent of his first shot, but vastly ambitious of taking a vizzy along the gun, which he finds ready in a nook for the raffle of a ewe-milk cheese on the morrow; and venturing to draw the trigger with a thumping heart, he feels he could have done a cushie. Beyond the draughtplayers are a set of urchins, on a narrow seat with three legs, fighting, and sprawling, and, squealing, till Vulcan, his face waxing red as a nail-string with wrath, as he bends lower on his blast, sends the whole soul of Æolus through his quivering, dancing fire, and blows a tempest of sparks into the flushed begrimed faces of the unruly young rascals, who spring from the settle; and kicking the draught-board with half its men into the trough, as they scatter away, they achieve their escape from the smithy. A leash of horses, to have their shoes sharpened, now fill the place; and Burnewin', getting ill-natured from the quantity of work to do, and giving pithy tokens

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that his hand is encumbered with company, our poor thatcher is again driven to his shifts, and can make nothing more of it than just slink away home, and get darkling into bed without facing his wife, who, to justify her plea, takes care to let him hear her bustling and working like a Fury far later than usual, as if the whole maintenance of the household now lay upon her industrious shoulder.

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A brisk walk in the morning, what time the sun comes up the eastern horizon like a great red globe of fire, and flames on every facing window along the western valley; a hearty breakfast; family prayers; three hours in my Library; another constitutional" in the somewhat mellower noor; an early old-fashioned dinner, to which the concocting genius of a Brillat-Savarin or a Ude could lend no improving sauce; another stout evening walk among the brown forest leaves, along the coarse chapped stubbles and stony moors, over the ferny skirts of the hill, and home by the old quarry hole, making my way through its withered, empty, cankered thistles, and its dry, hollow, rattling skeleton kexes, bent all the while on the pleasure of starting a hare; tea, talk, reading, or backgammon, with sister Mary; another spell in my Library; a look at the starry night; supper; devotion; bed,— such is the Old Bachelor's cheerful Winter Day.

Listen again to Spencer: Thus he sings of December:- A

"And after him came next the chill December;
Yet he through merry feastings which he made,
And great bonfires did not the cold remember;
His Saviour's birth his mind so much did glad.
Upon a shaggy-bearded goat he rode,
The same wherewith Dan Jove in tender years,
They say, was nourished by the Iæan maid;
And in his hand a broad deep bowle he bears,

Of which he freely drinks a health to all his peers."

The feasting, the goodly punch-bowl, and the rousing fire, are all cordially characteristic of December. And then our Village children have "Barring-out Day," "Guisarts," Cake-day," and "Hansel Monday this last, however, belonging to the New Year. In Scotland, however, we have not yet learned to link our grateful happiness

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with any outward religious observance of the most blessed natal day that ever dawned on earth, as is done in England, where even yet (though more so in the olden time) the very season is considered sacredly wholesome against all unnatural harms :

"Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes,
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singèth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to harm,
So hallowed and so gracious is the time."

The last hour of the last day of the year is waning away. Born in the confluence of two Eternities, in that measured space called Time, let me thank my great Maker that He has given me a rational life, and that a very fair allotment of joy and sorrow has been cut out for me from the great web of human circumstances. Yes, let us all be thankful for sorrow as well as for joy; for without it where were charity and love, and all those affections that make the human family so interesting in the Universe of God? Without it, how could we value aright that Incarnation of Deity, by which our Great Father has at once provided a remedy for our fall, a perfect motive for us to love Him eternally, and a means of our being able to hold intimate and endearing communion with Him for ever as one of ourselves-our own Elder Brother? May every successive New Year find us all growing fitter and fitter for that great communion! Amen!

THE END.

DUMFRIES: PRINTED BY W. C. CRAW.