The Scot at Home.

Bruce Herald, Volume IX, Issue 811, 13 June 1876, Page 7

The Scot at Home.

w Before the days of village hotels and cheap excursions, a single introduction passed the stranger from house to house over the length and breadth of the land. His worst embarrassment was in tearing himself away from the somewhat oppressive importunities of hia kindly entertainers. Among themselves, too, the Scotch have carried sociability to excess, till the national virtue came to verge on a vice. "Sixty years since," before Sir Walter Scott was writing ' Waverley,' the good company at Tully Veolan were so loth to part, that they dragged the Baron away from his own hospitable table, to empty the tappit hens in Lucky Macleary's miserable changehouse. Read Dean Ramsay's stories of Scotish humor among the Forfarshire lairds, whose native wit never showed to so much advantage as when they were doing each other the honors of their choicest bins. Or Archibald Constable's Memoirs with the memoranda of Mr Hunter's bacchanalian tours among the same convivial gentlemen, with the excessively wet nights of Brechin Castle and elsewhere. Perhaps the old alliance with the French laid the foundations of the social education of the Scottish gentry, as it supplied them with those favorite clarets and cognac thafc scarcely carried a headache in a hogshead. But the middle and lower classes have always been just as friendly and neighbor-like in their instincts. Hear the Ettrick Shepherd in the ' Noctes Ambrosianae,' as to the quantity of ' materials ' for whisky-toddy that he got through in a single summer at Mount Benger. Something of an exaggeration, and yet it was hard to say how much the strong heads of these sturdy Borderers might carry when the Dandy Dinmonts chanced to foregather over the social glass at " a play "or a market, The very ministers set the seal of the Church on the decent and discreet indulgences of the table, and we believe there were no merrier meetings in the country than those thafc came off in many a country manse on the Bolemn occasion of " the half-yearly preaching." See their parishioners, elders and all, gathered round the beef and greens afc a curling dinner, bandying the local jests and repartees, that have generally both point and pith, and then say if the Scotch are an unsocial people. The clergymen and their flocks, when in the way of meeting on a common ground of a week day, come to understand each other thoroughlj, and the kind tolerance of the one encourages the innocent recreation of the other; like the worthy minister, who made the following most sensible announcement among others more usually delivered from the pulpifc before dismissing his parishioners with the blessing :— " My brethren, there is no more harm in saying it than thinking it — if the frost holds I'll be on the ice

ing of churches and manses, look at the congregation collecting in the churchyard before the diet of worship of a fine morning. The men are ranged albng the wall itf their Sabbath black, , like rows of rooks in the new-turned furrows, heads together in eager, converse ; and the good wive§ groups when " the kirk s kails," discoursing we fear of other subfjecfcß than :theißermpn.--—f Blackwood.', • _ — _— > __^ __^__