Schools and Schoolmasters

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1855. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XV. See Inebriety, her wand she waves, And Jo! her pale, and lo! her purple slaves. I Was joined in the course of a few weeks, in Peggy Russel's one-roomed cottage, by another lodger, --lodgers of the humbier class usually consociating together in pairs. My new companion had lived for some time, ere my arrival at Niddry, in a neighboring domicile, which, as he was what was termed a quiet living man, and as the inmates were turbulent and unsteady, he had, after bearing a good deal, been compelled to quit. Like our foreman, he was a strict Seceder, in full communion with his Church. Though merely a common laborer, with not more than half the wages of our skilled workmen, I had observed, ere our acquaintance began, that no mason in the squad was more comfortably attired on weekdays than he, or wore a better suit on Sunday; and so I had set him down, from the circumstance, as a decent man. I now found that, like my uncle Sandy, he was a great reader of good books, --an admirer even of the same old authors, ---deeply read, like him, in Durham and Eutherford, --and entertaining, too, a high respect for Baxter, Boston, old John Brown, and the Erskines. In one respect, however, he differed from both my uncles: he had begun to question the excellence of religious Establishments; nay, to hold that the country might be none the worse were its ecclesiastical endowments taken away, --a view which our foreman also entertained; whereas both Uncles Sandy and James were as little averse as the old divines themselves to a State-paid ministry, and desiderated only that it should be a good one. There were two other Seceders engaged as masons at the work, --more of the polemical and less of the devout type than the foreman or my new comrade the laborer; and they also us...