there were the members of his own kirk-session, there were the men to whom he was wont to give good-morning when he met them on the road or at market.  Unable to discover his own image in the throng, he was inwardly marvelling whose funeral it could be, when the troop of spectres vanished, and the road was empty as before.  Then, remembering that the coffin had an invisible occupant, he cried out, “It is my funeral!” and, with all his strength taken out of him, rode home to die.  All these stories have their own touches of terror; yet I am inclined to think that my lark rising from the scaffold foot, and singing to two such auditors, is more terrible than any one of them.

CHRISTMAS

Over the dial-face of the year, on which the hours are months, the apex resting in sunshine, the base in withered leaves and snows, the finger of time does not travel with the same rapidity.  Slowly it creeps up from snow to sunshine; when it has gained the summit it seems almost to rest for a little; rapidly it rushes down from sunshine to the snow.  Judging from my own feelings, the distance from January to June is greater than from June to January—­the period from Christmas to Midsummer seems longer than the period from Midsummer to Christmas.  This feeling arises, I should fancy, from the preponderance of light on that half of the dial on which the finger seems to be travelling upwards, compared with the half on which it seems to be travelling downwards.  This light to the eye, the mind translates into time.  Summer days are long, often wearisomely so.  The long-lighted days are bracketed together by a little bar of twilight, in which but a star or two find time to twinkle.  Usually one has less occupation in summer than in winter, and the surplusage of summer light, a stage too large for the play, wearies, oppresses, sometimes appalls.  From the sense of time we can only shelter ourselves by occupation; and when occupation ceases while yet some three or four hours of light remain, the burden falls down, and is often greater than we can bear.  Personally, I have a certain morbid fear of those endless summer twilights.  A space of light stretching from half-past 2 A.M. to 11 P.M. affects me with a sense of infinity, of horrid sameness, just as the sea or the desert would do.  I feel that for too long a period I am under the eye of the taskmaster.  Twilight is always in itself, or at least in its suggestions, melancholy; and these midsummer twilights are so long, they pass through such series of lovely change, they are throughout so mournfully beautiful, that in the brain they beget strange thoughts, and in the heart strange feelings.  We see too much of the sky, and the long, lovely, pathetic, lingering evening light, with its suggestions of eternity and death, which one cannot for the soul of one put into words, is somewhat too much for the comfort of a sensitive human mortal.  The day