entered the service of king Charles II., followed the army to the continent, and in a short time after died in Holland, fighting bravely for his sovereign.

His farewell with his wife had been short and hurried. He advised her to return with her little ones, Helen and William, the former of whom was then four, and the latter two years old, to her native place; recommended. them to their Father in heaven; and the last words which Mrs. Thomson's ear caught from that voice which she was to hear no more, were these: "O my dear Agnes, teach these little ones to know and remember their Creator in the days of their youth, that if I see you and them no more in this valley of tears, I may meet you and them at last by the river of life, in the paradise of God."

Immediately after this painful parting, Mrs. Thomson returned to the place of her birth, in the neighbourhood of Louden-hill. I need not tell the young reader, with what feelings she crossed the little moor-streams, by which she was wont to walk with her James-now she looked up the winding glen, where her ear had often turned to his affectionate voice, or listened with still more solid delight, while he read a chapter from the book of God, to dissipate their fears, and strengthen their hopes of eternal life-now, her eyes streaming

once with joy and sorrow, fell back on her little William, the dear miniature of his father. A steady habit of industry; the remembrance of a youth spent in religion; her two infants, and an unwavering trust in the kindness of her Maker and Redeemer, were all the riches which Mrs. Thomson brought home to the place of her nativity. Her near relations thinned away by the hand of disease, or cut off by the sword of persecution, had left her father's house desolate. George Paton, a man who had been her father's shepherd, now possessed the farm. He received the daughter of his former master kindly; as-signed her a snug hut, in which, while a servant, he lived himself, and gave her a cow, that her infants might not be without milk, which the old shepherd very properly observed was the best liquid Scotland produced, except water.

Cleughhead, the name of this little habitation, was situated at the head of one of those solitary glens, so common in the wilder districts of Scotland. The walls were built with rough granite; the roof thatched with the heath of the mountain, and the rushes of the brook; and the interior, where the peat burned on the hearth, and the smoke rose up unconfined by any chimney, till it escaped by a little hole in the roof, although very unlike the

abode Mrs. Thomson had left in Glasgow, was soon rendered, by her own industry and native cleanliness, and the ready assistance of the old farmer, neat and comfortable.

Past the door of this humble dwelling, feebly murmured a mountain rill: as it rambled in frolicsome meanders down the slope, now kissing the blooming heath, now rippling among the green rushes, and again playing with the shadow of the grey-willow, its channel deepened as the sides of the glen drew nearer one another. Here the projecting rock and crooked hazel on the one side, and the tall fern and stunted sloethorn on the other, mingled their dancing shadows on the torrent, which loud and impetuous, forced its headlong way, like the youth impatient for full. manhood. Again the glen gradually opened; the spreading stream giving back the image of the sober ox, and sportive lamb, that cropt the verdant herb and wild daisy by its side; and at length smoothening its surface, laying asleep every turbulent wave, purifying its waters on the gravelly sand of its course, and reflecting the heaven only from its clear bosom, fell, like the dying Christian without a murmur, into the current of the Irvin. The general features of the surrounding scenery, were impressed with an air of solemn melancholy. To the north and east extended leve!

tracts of gloomy moorland, relieved, here and there, by the smoke curling from the shepherd's lonely hut, a straggling dwarf tree or two which grew about his dwelling, and the little verdant meadow plot redeemed from the dark waste, which lay before his door. At intervals too were to be seen a shepherd boy with his dog; and spreading around him, in little groupes, here and there scattered and solitary, the white-fleeced sheep wandering on the brown heath. To the south and south-west, rose the unambitious hills of Dumfries and Galloway; and conspicuous among them with its round head, the Twelve-hour hill, over whose head, the shepherds of that country well knew, the sun walks at mid-day. Spread out to the west were the fertile, but monotonous district of Ayrshire, watered by those streams, delightfully romantic when you approach them, Ayr, Irvin, and Doon, which carried the eye down their course till it reposed on the glassy bosom of the Atlantic, oftener in those days visited by the dreadful war-ship, than enlivened by the cheerful sail of the merchantman. Terminating the view in this direction, was the bold elevations of Arran, on whose castled peaks the cloud delights to sit, and from whose tops the sun of autumn cast his last look of glory on the western districts of Scotland.

In this humble dwelling, surrounded thus by the chaste and solemn countenance of nature, did Mrs. Thomson set herself diligently to educate her children: to imbue their minds early with habits of industry; and above all, to bring them up in the fear of the Lord; to teach them to know their Creator in the days of their youth. Every morning and evening, she went, leading Helen in the one hand, and William in the other, to the farm house, and joined with the old Shepherd in worshipping the God of salvation. Early on the dawn of every Sabbath was Agnes up, and prepared, not with the anointed hair, and tinkling ornaments, which employ so much the thoughts of many females on the morning of the Lord's day, but by communing with her own heart, and by expostulating with her God in private for setting out, often five, sometimes six, seven, or eight miles, to hear preached the glad tidings of eternal life. And in those days, surely you know, young reader, it was no smooth road, no pleasure walk, to the house of God, Every one sat not then, as we do now, under his own vine and fig-tree, having none to make him afraid;" but the solitary moor-hut, the glen of the mountain, or the cave of the rock, were often the only places in which the voice of the true servants of God, the shepherds that shall never need to be ashamed,

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