An old clerical friend upon Speyside, a confirmed bachelor, on going up to the pulpit one Sunday to preach, found, after giving out the psalm, that he had forgotten his sermon.  I do not know what his objections were to his leaving the pulpit, and going to the manse for his sermon, but he preferred sending his old confidential housekeeper for it.  He accordingly stood up in the pulpit, stopped the singing which had commenced, and thus accosted his faithful domestic:—­“Annie; I say, Annie, we’ve committed a mistak the day.  Ye maun jist gang your waa’s hame, and ye’ll get my sermon oot o’ my breek-pouch, an’ we’ll sing to the praise o’ the Lord till ye come back again.”  Annie, of course, at once executed her important mission, and brought the sermon out of “the breek-pouch,” and the service, so far as we heard, was completed without further interruption.

My dear friend, the late Rev. Dr. John Hunter, told me an anecdote very characteristic of the unimaginative matter-of-fact Scottish view of matters.  One of the ministers of Edinburgh, a man of dry humour, had a daughter who had for some time passed the period of youth and of beauty.  She had become an Episcopalian, an event which the Doctor accepted with much good-nature, and he was asking her one day if she did not intend to be confirmed.  “Well,” she said, “I don’t know.  I understand Mr. Craig always kisses the candidates whom he prepares, and I could not stand that.”  “Indeed, Jeanie,” said the Doctor slily, “gin Edward Craig were to gie ye a kiss, I dinna think ye would be muckle the waur.”

Many anecdotes characteristic of the Scottish peasant often turn upon words and ideas connected with Holy Scripture.  This is not to be considered as in any sense profane or irreverent; but it arises from the Bible being to the peasantry of an older generation their library—­their only book.  We have constant indications of this almost exclusive familiarity with Scripture ideas.  At the late ceremonial in the north, when the Archbishop of Canterbury laid the foundation of a Bishop’s Church at Inverness, a number of persons, amid the general interest and kindly feeling displayed by the inhabitants, were viewing the procession from a hill as it passed along.  When the clergy, to the number of sixty, came on, an old woman, who was watching the whole scene with some jealousy, exclaimed, at sight of the surplices, “There they go, the whited sepulchres!” I received another anecdote illustrative of the same remark from an esteemed minister of the Free Church:  I mean of the hold which Scripture expressions have upon the minds of our Scottish peasantry.  One of his flock was a sick nervous woman, who hardly ever left the house.  But one fine afternoon, when she was left alone, she fancied she would like to get a little air in the field adjoining the house.  Accordingly she put on a bonnet and wrapped herself in a huge red shawl.  Creeping along the dyke-side, some cattle were attracted towards her, and first