folly,—wed, I say, a strong-handed chield, who can keep the crown of the causeway, and make himself be obeyed at his own fireside. A cannie homely lad, who can clip seven score of sheep while another clips six; kens the buttered frae the bare side of the bread; loves nought so well as his own wife but the knotting of his own purse-strings; and who fears the Lord, and can back five bushels of barley."
This grave and worldly counsellor fairly exhausted himself, and, laying his head on the cushion, and fixing his eye on his bag of gold, which common fame calculated at a thousand pieces, remained silent while that devout person, Haudthegrup, commenced family devotion. He had examined the New Testament for a fitting and seemly text; but the divine meekness and charity and self-denial, and scorn of all terrestrial grandeur, which inspire its pages, rejected all community of feeling, and obliged him to seek consolation under the splendid and ostentatious dispensations of the Mosaic law.
"Spoiling the Egyptians," I heard him mutter, as he hastened along, "the heathen Egyptians of their jewels of silver, and jewels of gold, a meritorious deed; making the molten calf, a piece of dark idolatry, and a waste of precious metal; spoiling the Amalekite, a rich and a pagan people, a pleasant act and an acceptable. The Temple, ay, ay, the Temple of Solomon, the roof thereof was of fine cedar, the pillars of ivory, the floor of pure silver, and the walls of beaten gold—this has often consoled me, and doubtless will console him. It would be pleasant to die with a vision of this golden palace before him." Here he raised his head and said audibly: "Let us begin the worship of Him on high, by readfng in his praise first Kings, chapter the sixth." And, elevating his voice, he chanted forth the history of the building of Solomon's Temple, adorning it with the prolonged tone and quavering grace-notes of an ancient Cameronian professor. Nor did he fail to express his own admiration at the profusion of precious metal, by dwelling, with a delight that seemed unwilling to depart, on the passages recording the overlayings of the wall with gold, and the altar, and the floor. As he proceeded, the eye of old Warlsworm looked on his own sooty rafters, and on his coarse unhewn floor, and on the ark which contained his meal; yet what were they, covered, as his imagination made them, with beaten gold, compared to the immeasurable
