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ture, instead of leanings towards either nothing or the vice and idleness of villages. I am told that proprietors are beginning to find from painful experience that an insufficient number of twohorse farms and cottages for farm-servants is a mistaken policy.

The difference in the relationship of the farmservant to his master at present, and what it was fifty years ago, is very great, and much to be deplored. This is due partly to facility of locomotion by railway, but much more to the gradual decay of community of interest between employer and employed. Formerly changes were the exception, not the rule. Now men and women remove from one farm to another often for no reason but love of change. Formerly, a rumour that a servant was leaving his situation produced quite an excitement in the country parish, followed by such questions as, "Why is he leaving and where is he going?" It was also usual for the servant to ask from his minister a certificate of character. The precentor on Sunday immediately before the blessing was pronounced intimated in a loud voice that A B or C D was leaving the parish and wished to have a certificate of moral character, adding, "If any person has anything to say against him, noo's the time."

not only has this public form been discontinued, but it is probably very seldom that any desire is shown for such certification.

I know some ministers who take a warm interest in the condition of farm-servants, but a much larger number fail to show such living, quickening, and human interest as almost invariably meets with a more or less hearty response from even the most reckless and indifferent. I know a parish in the north where the bothy system is the rule, and in which, a few years ago, during the minister's absence on the score of ill-health, an assistant had charge of the parish for six months. He saw and pitied the poor hinds, who, as a rule, bulked no more largely in their masters' estimation than a plough, or reapingmachine, or other farm implement. He visited them in their bothies, smoked a friendly pipe with them, talked on subjects of a practical kind in which they took an interest-the possibility and advantage of thrift as a means of improving their social condition, and, in the case of married men, advancing the interests of their families— all this from a sympathetically human, rather than an aggressively clerical, standpoint. He had for his reward that, by the end of his six months' temporary assistantship, almost every

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hind in the parish was a regular attendant at church. Surely his example is worthy of imitation.

This slackening of the old kindly relationship between master and servant is not confined to farmers and farm - servants. We seldom hear now of volunteered remarks from servants to a master or mistress which were formerly allowed, and which were not marks of forwardness, but of a homely familiarity in no sense aggressive or inconsistent with the greatest respect. Servants were not so much a class apart as they are now. An instance of which I was an earwitness occurs to me. The janitor of a public institution, a man well known and much respected, was often employed as waiter at private dinner-parties. On one occasion when the lady on my left hand declined to have any of the chartreuse which he was handing round, he thinking, perhaps correctly, that her refusal was due more to observance of feminine propriety than to dislike of the beverage, fell back on his experience as a waiter, and said in a low kindly tone, "It's quite allowable, Mrs M., it's quite allowable."

One can with difficulty imagine that now there could be such pactions between masters and servants as are said to have existed formerly

about alternately keeping sober with a view to safe driving home from dinner-parties. On one occasion when it was the servant's turn to "keep straight" he had found the good cheer of the kitchen too tempting. Feeling this, he went to his master in the dining-room and whispered into his ear, "Laird, ye had better tak' care; it's a' bye wi' me the nicht." Another laird who was in the habit of dining not wisely but too well had often profited by his servant's help in taking him from the conveyance and placing him safely in the lobby of his house. One night when this assistance was more than ordinarily beneficial the laird said, "Man, Robert, ye're a gude auld soul, and that horse has been a gude servant too. When you and that auld horse dees, dod! I'll stuff ye baith."

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CHAPTER XIX.

THE ACADEMY OF OLD DEer-sir george reid, PAUL CHALMERS, ROBERTSON SMITH, SIR DAVID GILL-LARGE DINNER-PARTIES A SOCIAL MISTAKE.

Of all the pleasant memories-and they are many-connected with my fourteen years' residence in Aberdeen, none exceed-I am not sure that any equal-in sweetness of savour the annual meetings, in the manse of Old Deer, of ten or twelve men of congenial tastes, who, without written constitution or formality of any kind, gravitated to that manse in the happy valley once a-year, under the influence of such a community of taste in art, literature, and social questions as made intercourse delightful, the interchange of opinion stimulative, and the evening's experience one of the brightest spots of the year. From the large element of art, practical or critical, represented by its members, the association - if one may dignify so small a thing by so grand a name