embryo parson shed tears, we yet discovered so many interesting things that he was always eager to join us.
On one of these exploring tours — long before geology was so popular as it is now — we entered a limestone quarry. It is impossible to describe the wonder Avith which I began to collect the shells of the carboniferous limestone which crops out in High Blantyre and Cambuslang. A quarryman looked at me with that pitying eye which the benevolent assume when viewing the insane. "However," said I, "did these shells come into these rocks?" "When God made the rocks, He made the shells in them," was the damping reply.
My reading in the factory was carried on by placing the book on a portion of the spinning jenny, so that I could catch sentence after sentence as I passed at my work; I thus kept up a pretty constant study undistui'bed by the roar of the machinery. To this part of my education I owe my power of completly abstracting my mind from surrounding noises, so as to read and write with perfect comfort amidst the play of children or the dancing and songs of savages. The labour of cotton-spinning, to which I was promoted in my nineteenth year, was excessively severe on a slim lad, but it was well paid, and enabled me to support myself while attending medical and Greek classes in Glasgow in winter, and the divinity lectures of Dr. Wardlaw in summer. Looking back now on that period of toil, I cannot but feel thankful that it formed such a material part of my early education ; and were I to begin life over again, I should like to pass through the same hardy training. I never received a farthing from any one, and should have accomplished my project of going to China as a medical missionary by my own efforts, had not some friends advised my joining the London Missionary Society on account of its unsectarian character. It "sends neither episcopacy, nor presbyterianism, nor independency, but the gospel of Christ to the heathen "This exactly agreed with my ideas of what a Missionary Society ought to do ; but it was not without a pang that I offered myself, for it was not agreeable to one accustomed to work his own way to become in a measure dependent on others.
Time and travel have not effaced the feelings of respect I imbibed for the inhabitants of my native village. For mo-
