former splendid garniture, and substituted a cap of very homely pretensions in its room. Miss Jacky was seated in front of the fire with her feet on the fender, apparently half asleep, and Lexy was busily engaged in repairing a garment, which, on my entrance, was hastily thrust under a chair, and obscured as much as possible from observation. The appearance of a gentleman in the drawing-room was indeed a novelty, and, under the circumstances, not a very pleasing one. After partaking, therefore, of a dish of cold tea, and exerting myself for some time to keep up a languid conversation, I wished the ladies good night, and departed.

As I retrod my way to the College, I reflected on the novel scene and characters I had just quitted, and when my head was on my pillow, the contrast rose strongly between that society in which I had recently mingled, and the calm and quiet elegance of my beloved home. In my dreams that night, I returned to Thornhill. My mother came forth to embrace me, with love beaming from her pale countenance, and even the welcome of my father was kind. There, too, was Jane with her dove-like eyes, and little Lucy, than whom

No dolphin ever was more gay,

Upon the tropic sea,

as, with beating heart and glowing cheeks, she ran to cast herself into my arms.

Such were the visions of the night; they were broken only by the sound of the College bell, which recalled me unwillingly to the more material world in which I was destined to move. After dressing by the cold hazy twilight of a winter's morning, I hurried across the College courts, more than ankle

deep in snow, to my class. I was too late. Prayers were over, and the lecture had begun. The Professor lowered his huge eyebrows on me as I entered, and in a moment all my pleasing dreams were forgotten.

Ar breakfast, Professor R-- appeared curious to know what impression had been made on me by the society into which on the day previous I had for the first time been introduced. He laughed at the description I gave of it, but said it was perhaps scarcely fair to judge entirely of the society of Glasgow by the specimen I had already seen. "In this city," he said, "there are two circles. Of the one, which includes the great majority of the mercantile and manufacturing aristocracy, I need say nothing, since you are already, from actual observation, tolerably qualified to judge for yourself. But there is another, a smaller circle, to which you have not yet been introduced. It consists principally of those who have united a taste for literature with the pursuits of business, and have not merged all the higher powers of a rational being, in the manufacture of muslins or the importation of tobacco. The individuals of whom this circle is composed, are of course comparatively few, and, like their neighbours, are not untinged with some ludicrous peculiarities. These are fair game, and may be laughed at; yet you will find that in many essential points, they rise superiour to the general body of society by which

they are surrounded. It is in this circle alone that the Professors of the University ever mingle, and though not much in the habit of frequenting it myself, I will take care, if your curiosity is not yet satiated, to procure you an introduction."

I thanked the Professor for his offer, and accepted it; nor did I neglect, during my residence in Glasgow, frequently to take advantage of the introduction he was good enough to afford.

Nothing, I think, tends more to open the understanding, and enlarge the mind, of a young man just entering on life, than an opportunity of observing the manners, and tracing the prevailing current of thought, in classes of society different from his own. In this will be found the most efficacious antidote to that narrow bigotry, and those exclusive modes of thinking, which seldom fail eventually to impair the understanding, by circumscribing its exercise and expansion. Of minds originally endowed with equal strength, his will be found best prepared to take a useful share in the business of the world, of whom it can be said, that

"Mores hominum multorum vidit et urbes."

But I would speak only of myself, and I know of no more useful branch of education to which I have been indebted, than that which I studied at the supper parties and coteries of the Glasgow dowagers.

The only companion with whom at this period my intercourse at all approached to intimacy, was Charles Conyers, who, like myself, was an inmate in the family of one of the Professors. He was a young Irishman, whom the death of his parents had freed, at an early age, from all moral control and guidance, and who had grown up from infancy to

the verge of manhood, in the almost unlimited indulgence of every caprice. His guardians considered it their duty to protect his fortune, not to form his character, and suffered their ward to plunge into premature dissipation, if not without remonstrance, at least without any effectual restraint. It was, in truth, only owing to his own naturally generous disposition, that Charles Conyers had not become entirely a profligate. His very boyhood had been sullied by the precocious adoption of the vices of maturer age; and he had attained a proficiency in loose and dissolute acquirement, apparently inconsistent with his years. With all this, however, he had not, as might have been expected, grown up into a cold and heartless rake. Far from it. He possessed all the elements of a fine and noble character; and he displayed, when circumstances called it forth, a warmth and tenderness of feeling certainly incompatible with innate depravity of heart. To me he particularly attached himself; and there was a charm in the openness and gaiety of his disposition, which I found it impossible to resist. He was the very soul of whim and frolic, and possessed in perfection that peculiar humour and vivacity indigenous to the Emerald Isle. It is probable, that under other circumstances, this intimacy might have been attended by bad consequences. In Glasgow it was not so. Both Conyers and myself were framed of very ductile materials, and if our intercourse occasionally involved me in scrapes, and led me into situations certainly of very doubtful propriety, my influence with him was at least sufficient to prevent his lapsing into any of those grosser excesses, which he knew I could not but regard with disgust.

It is perhaps an advantage to Glasgow, as a seminary of education, that it affords none of the ap