felt that his poor rough tackle was to be absolutely glorified by such a minister as Guthrie condescending to touch it, but his good wife did not like this come-down at the end of such a visit as his has been, and she said so.  She was a clever old woman, and I am not sure but she had the best of it in the debate that followed about ministers fishing, and about their facetious conversation.  The Haddington stream, and the dispute that rose out of it, recall to my mind a not unlike incident that took place in the street of Ephesus, in the far East, just about 1800 years ago.  John, the venerable Apostle, had just finished the fourteenth chapter of his great Gospel, and felt himself unable to recollect and write out any more that night.  And coming out into the setting sun he began to amuse himself with a tame partridge that the Bactrian convert had caught and made a present of to his old master.  The partridge had been waiting till the pen and the parchment were put by, and now it was on John’s hand, and now on his shoulder, and now circling round his sportful head, till you would have thought that its owner was the idlest and foolishest old man in all Ephesus.  A huntsman, who greatly respected his old pastor, was passing home from the hills and was sore distressed to see such a saint as John was trifling away his short time with a stupid bird.  And he could not keep from stopping his horse and saying so to the old Evangelist.  ’What is that you carry in your hand?’ asked John at the huntsman with great meekness.  ’It is my bow with which I shoot wild game up in the mountains,’ replied the huntsman.  ’And why do you let it hang so loose?  You cannot surely shoot anything with your bow in that condition!’ ‘No,’ answered the amused huntsman, ’but if I always kept my bow strung it would not rebound and send home my arrow when I needed it.  I unstring my bow on the street that I may the better shoot with it when I am up among my quarry.’  ‘Good,’ said the Evangelist, ’and I have learned a lesson from you huntsmen.  For I am playing with my partridge to-night that I may the better finish my Gospel to-morrow.  I am putting everything out of my mind to-night that I may to-morrow the better recollect and set down a prayer I heard offered up by my Master, now more than fifty years ago.’  We readers of the Fourth Gospel do not know how much we owe to the Bactrian boy’s tame partridge, and neither John Owen nor Thomas Chalmers knew how much they owed to the fishing-rods and curling-stones, the fowling-pieces and the violins that crowded the corners of the manse of Fenwick.  I do not know that William Guthrie made a clean breast to the Presbytery of all the reasons that moved him to refuse so many calls to a city charge, though I think I see that David Dickson, the Moderator, divined some of them by the joke he made about the moors of Fenwick to one of the defeated and departing deputations.