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JEAN CAMERON'S COLLEGE.

BY ALLAN CUNNINGHAM.

SOME men have the honour of being educated in fine cities, and by gentlemen in large wigs: I was educated in a very little village, and by a very old woman. The name of the village is unknown in tale or ballad, though a spot for a pastoral poet to love, or a painter to sketch. It is miserably poor, and much out of the way, and produces no better commodities than plaiden webs, green kale, and handsome lads and lasses. I need not be more particular, unless to say that it is the only village in Scotland which refuses to grow larger, or to part with its people; nay, it is recorded of one of them, that, penetrating on a time beyond the hills which girdle in the valley, he came back with a report that he had found very respectable folk on the other side; but his neighbours shook their heads, and no one had the curiosity to go and see the truth of the story.

In this small village, and among this original people, I was educated; the name of my schoolmistress was Jean Cameron. I would have concealed it, like that of the village itself, but the district newspaper, hard pushed on the day of her death for what it called a bit of the local, gave her name to posterity.

I had not been many days at school when I began to find that the village had inhabitants of some note and renown; namely, two weavers, whose voices in psalmody reached above the Bangor; a fiddler, to whose instrument no one could dance, who was not of the place, so original was his music; a cooper, who it was remarked excelled more in prayer than in pail-making; and three old women, who had no more visible means of livelihood than what a spinning-wheel, half a dozen hens, and a little garden supplied. How they lived Heaven best knows, since to the care of Heaven alone they seemed to be left. But what these good people prided themselves most in was, in actually possessing a minister of the Gospel, and a place of worship wholly and exclusively their own. The divine was a worthy of the Cameronian sect, whose mystic discourses were always supposed to intimate a coming glory to the covenanting church. When, having dealt with free grace, effectual calling, and election, he cleft darkly into the more personal

matter of defection of princes and peers from the cause, a hum of approbation was heard around, and sometimes an elder would mutter, "He's in the marrow of the whole now!" The church of this

worthy was of the grandest dimensions, and its architect, contemplating man's selfishness in things voluntary, had made it so complete, that it needed no repairs; in truth, its roof was of air and its walls of wind, for it was a little wild broomy hollow : the pulpit of the preacher was an upright stone, the seats of the hearers was the grassy turf; but on a summer morn, when the sun was up, the larks in the air, and the preacher in a happy vein, the eye and ear were alike gratified, and the Cameronian kirk was worth a visit.

A kirk not built with hands, and a clergyman who owned God alone, and disclaimed all other patronage, required a school after their kind, and they had it. This, as the mistress sometimes proudly averred, was none of your act of parliament schools, but one made by the necessities of the place and people. It was a hovel; the fire of turf, supplied by the scholars, was on the ground; the smoke eddied slowly round and round, trying, and now and then succeeding, to escape in gusts at window and door, till at last it found the hole in the roof a legitimate vent, from whence it issued, but not without imparting a taste of its flavour to

hams and flitches, presents from more opulent Cameronians, which hung over our heads. The scholars, some fifty in number, were of either sex; we all learned our lessons aloud: the noisiest was in high favour, and the clang and confusion of tongues sometimes attracted the passers-by, and caused them alike to listen and wonder.

The mistress, Jean Cameron, was short and stout, with a straight nose, full lips, eyes grey and clear, a hand ready and sharp with the tawse, and a tongue as musical as the voice of the morning lark. She condescended to teach the Bible and New Testament only-all other books she called the frivolous inventions of men. Grammar and spelling, and reading by the sense or pauses, came not within her scheme of teaching; she had heard of them, however, for I heard her say in prayer that they were vain things, a trade by themselves; and when once, in a less severe mood, she desired us to read a chapter by the stops, instead of the more natural way by the measure of our breaths, she said it was a foolish thing, and though one or more of us promised to excel, she would not persevere, and she did not. The notes of interrogation puzzled her much; she called them little crooked emissaries, and declared that they came into a page like a stone into a stream, for no other purpose but to disturb it. The Bible was the sole volume,

and she read it with profit; it was the only book, she said, worthy of the name, and in it was contained all knowledge. She could find Scripture for any thing, and was skilful in the discovery of allegorical meanings. She allowed some chapters of the Cloud of Witnesses to lie on her shelves, and she admitted that, of all latter apostles, Alexander Peden came nearest to her notion of a true divine, for he was, she said, both prophet and preacher; " and was it not our own Sandie," she once triumphantly exclaimed," who dropt the great truth, that wherever a praying lass or lad was found at a dyke back, there had God built his kirk, and spread her banner?"

We loved the school and we loved the mistress; for though in times of more than common exasperation she flogged us all round, yet her hand was light, and her tawse were neither hardened in the fire at the tips, as she said, like that sharp teacher's Dominie Macknight's, nor armed with lead drop, like the strap of that harsh creature Dominie Davison, and only put the bairns in mind of their duty, poor things, without hurting them. One thing alone troubled us: there were other schools in the district kept by men, and in a moment of spite at hearing the fame old Jean had acquired in making what she called "good Gospel scholars," her little smoky hovel, whence all this erudition issued, was