"Ay, did he."

"And fat did he say aboot it?"

"Weel, he just said he didna ken and he didna
care."

The notion of a doctor of divinity neither
kenning nor caring about the highly important
doctrine of Predestination, so tickled the fancy of
the company, that they went into fits of laughter.

A Scotchman is never surprised at anything,
and soon gets used to a change of circumstances.
Make him a king to-day, and to-morrow he will
feel that he has been a king all his life. Here
was this auld carl Sandy, who had never seen a
railway until he was half a century old,
complaining of the slowness of the travelling. After
having expressed many wishes for a bottle of Bass,
and having facetiously reproached the directors
for not laying Bass on in pipes for the free use
of the passengers, he launched into a severe
criticism of the engineering skill which could devise
nothing better than a locomotive. And Sandy
concluded by wondering "when they were going
to blaw us through pipes."

When Sandy seemed to have exhausted
himself, one of the young men (evidently a shop-lad)
took up a book, and began to read.

"Fat buke's that you've got?" said Sandy.

"It's a work by Laurence Sterne," said the
youth, rather pompously, evidently thinking that
Sandy had never heard of Laurence Sterne.

"Ay, ay," said Sandy; "wisn'a he the chiel
that grat ower a deed cuddy, while he was leaving
his puir auld mither to sterve? Maybe it's
Tristram Shandy you're reading?"

The youth, a little abashed, owned that it was.

You cannot sit long in a railway carriage in
Scotland without being invaded by a missionary,
generally a semi-clerical-looking youth, with a bagful
of tracts, who no sooner enters than he takes
out a book and addresses the passengers as
O my friends. It is the practice of these
emissaries to pass from carriage to carriage, so
that, in the course of the journey, they may be able
to bring all the passengers under the influence of
the "truth;" always proceeding upon the
gratuitous presumption that nobody knows the
"truth" but themselves. It fared ill with the
young evangelist who came into our carriage.
Sandy immediately tackled him on many abstruse
points of theological dispute, of which the poor
boy had never heard; and, following these up with
a whimsical description of Jonah's adventures
with the whale, he so far got the best of the
controversy that he caused the missionary to drop
his mask of solemnity, and burst into a laugh, in
spite of himself.

And here I take the opportunity to remark
how frequently Scotch funny stories are founded
upon Biblical subjects, and have reference to
ministers, precentors, and odd things that have
occurred in church. There are thousands of
stories current in Scotland about ludicrous
mistakes that have been made in the pulpit, and
not a few of them make rather free with the
personages of sacred history.

It is curious how Scotchmen will Scotchify
the names of persons, places, and things, which
were originally Scotch. There is no rule for the
process. Ruthven is called Raffan, and here we
are slackening speed at a little town, which is
spelt Turriff, and is called Turra. Peterhead
lies on this route Peterhead, which is known
throughout the world for its red granite. It is
also famous in Scotland for its fleet of whalers;
and the names of many of its skippers figure in
the history of the Arctic expeditions. I have
no inducement to turn aside to Peterhead, and
hold straight on to Banff. Modern tourists do
not often take this route, at which I am
surprised; for the country is exceedingly beautiful,
and the two little towns of Banff and Macduff,
opposite to each other on the shores of a
lovely bay, with the river Deveron falling into
the sea midway between them, present a scenic
picture which will forcibly remind the traveller
of Naples. Like Naples, Macduff has a
mountain, though it is not quite so high as Vesuvius,
and does not send forth fire and smoke, except
on grand national occasions, when the
inhabitants celebrate their joy with a bonfire.
As bearing out the classical character of the
place, the Hill o' Doon is surmounted by a
Temple of Venus, erected by the late Earl of
Fife—who was a worshipper of the goddess, as
the last generation of Londoners may have
heard. At the foot of this hill, the Deveron
is spanned by the "bonny Brig o' Banff," which
the laddie cam' ower when he left the girl
behind him; and, away up the valley for miles by
the Deveron side, stretch the gardens and
grounds of Duff House, forming one of the most
beautiful parks in the kingdom. The white
Brig of Alvah, with its single arch, backed by
towering rocks, carpeted with fern, and nodding
with the leaf-plumage of the silver birch, is a
scene in a dream of fairyland. The scenery of
the highlands is grand, and stern, and rugged;
and the music that sweeps over it is the roar of
the cataract, and the thunder of the pines; but
here it is soft and sweet, and the breeze comes
in a breath laden with the fragrance of lowland
flowers, stirring the leaves gently. The calm
beauty of this scene on a summer's day is
something to be felt—not described.

It is intensely interesting to me, while
approaching Banff by the railway, to look down at
the old coach road, and think that along that
very road Dr. Johnson, seated beside Boswell,
in Frazer of Strichen's cart, made his pilgrimage
to the same town. "At night we came to
Banff," he says, "where I remember nothing
that particularly claimed my attention." Seeing
that the doctor came to Banff at night,, and went
away the next morning early, I don't know how
he could have seen anything at all but the
interior of the tavern at which he put up.
Indeed, this is all that he attempts to describe;
and so we have this about Banff, or, as it was
then called, Bamff:

"The art of joining squares of glass with lead