great man and a good; a minister if possible, a saint for certain. She
tried to engage his mind upon her favourite books, Rutherford's LETTERS,

Scougalls GRACE ABOUNDING, and the like. It was a common practice of
hers (and strange to remember now) that she would carry the child to the

Deil's Hags, sit with him on the Praying Weaver's stone, and talk of the
Covenanters till their tears ran down. Her view of history was wholly

artless, a design in snow and ink; upon the one side, tender innocents
with psalms upon their lips; upon the other, the persecutors, booted,

bloody-minded, flushed with wine: a suffering Christ, a raging
Beelzebub. PERSECUTOR was a word that knocked upon the woman's heart;

it was her highest thought of wickedness, and the mark of it was on her
house. Her great-great-grandfather had drawn the sword against the

Lord's anointed on the field of Rullion Green, and breathed his last
(tradition said) in the arms of the detestable Dalyell. Nor could she

blind herself to this, that had they lived in those old days, Hermiston
himself would have been numbered alongside of Bloody MacKenzie and the

politic Lauderdale and Rothes, in the band of God's immediate enemies.
The sense of this moved her to the more fervour; she had a voice for

that name of PERSECUTOR that thrilled in the child's marrow; and when
one day the mob hooted and hissed them all in my lord's travelling

carriage, and cried, "Down with the persecutor! down with Hanging
Hermiston!" and mamma covered her eyes and wept, and papa let down the

glass and looked out upon the rabble with his droll formidable face,
bitter and smiling, as they said he sometimes looked when he gave

sentence, Archie was for the moment too much amazed to be alarmed, but
he had scarce got his mother by herself before his shrill voice was

raised demanding an explanation: why had they called papa a persecutor?
"Keep me, my precious!" she exclaimed. "Keep me, my dear! this is

poleetical. Ye must never ask me anything poleetical, Erchie. Your
faither is a great man, my dear, and it's no for me or you to be judging

him. It would be telling us all, if we behaved ourselves in our several
stations the way your faither does in his high office; and let me hear

no more of any such disrespectful and undutiful questions! No that you
meant to be undutiful, my lamb; your mother kens that - she kens it

well, dearie!" And so slid off to safer topics, and left on the mind of
the child an obscure but ineradicable sense of something wrong.

Mrs. Weir's philosophy of life was summed in one expression -
tenderness. In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with

a glow out of the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind
of ecstasy of tenderness. The beasts and plants had no souls; they were

here but for a day, and let their day pass gently! And as for the
immortal men, on what black, downward path were many of them wending,

and to what a horror of an immortality! "Are not two sparrows,"
"Whosoever shall smite thee," "God sendeth His rain," "Judge not, that

ye be not judged" - these texts made her body of divinity; she put them
on in the morning with her clothes and lay down to sleep with them at

night; they haunted her like a favourite air, they clung about her like
a favourite perfume. Their minister was a marrowy expounder of the law,

and my lord sat under him with relish; but Mrs. Weir respected him from
far off; heard him (like the cannon of a beleaguered city) usefully

booming outside on the dogmatic ramparts; and meanwhile, within and out
of shot, dwelt in her private garden which she watered with grateful

tears. It seems strange to say of this colourless and ineffectual
woman, but she was a true enthusiast, and might have made the sunshine

and the glory of a cloister. Perhaps none but Archie knew she could be
eloquent; perhaps none but he had seen her - her colour raised, her

hands clasped or quivering - glow with gentle ardour. There is a corner
of the policy of Hermiston, where you come suddenly in view of the

summit of Black Fell, sometimes like the mere grass top of a hill,
sometimes (and this is her own expression) like a precious jewel in the

heavens. On such days, upon the sudden view of it, her hand would
tighten on the child's fingers, her voice rise like a song. "I TO THE

HILLS!" she would repeat. "And O, Erchie, are nae these like the hills
of Naphtali?" and her tears would flow.

Upon an impressionable child the effect of this continual and pretty
accompaniment to life was deep. The woman's quietism and piety passed

on to his different nature undiminished; but whereas in her it was a
native sentiment, in him it was only an implanted dogma. Nature and the

child's pugnacity at times revolted. A cad from the Potterrow once
struck him in the mouth; he struck back, the pair fought it out in the

back stable lane towards the Meadows, and Archie returned with a
considerable decline in the number of his front teeth, and

unregenerately boasting of the losses of the foe. It was a sore day for
Mrs. Weir; she wept and prayed over the infant backslider until my lord

was due from Court, and she must resume that air of tremulous composure
with which she always greeted him. The judge was that day in an

observant mood, and remarked upon the absent teeth.
"I am afraid Erchie will have been fechting with some of they blagyard

lads," said Mrs. Weir.
My lord's voice rang out as it did seldom in the privacy of his own

house. "I'll have norm of that, sir!" he cried. "Do you hear me? -
nonn of that! No son of mine shall be speldering in the glaur with any

dirty raibble."
The anxious mother was grateful for so much support; she had even feared

the contrary. And that night when she put the child to bed - "Now, my
dear, ye see!" she said, "I told you what your faither would think of

it, if he heard ye had fallen into this dreidful sin; and let you and me
pray to God that ye may be keepit from the like temptation or

strengthened to resist it!"
The womanly falsity of this was thrown away. Ice and iron cannot be

welded; and the points of view of the Justice-Clerk and Mrs. Weir were
not less unassimilable. The character and position of his father had

long been a stumbling-block to Archie, and with every year of his age
the difficulty grew more instant. The man was mostly silent; when he

spoke at all, it was to speak of the things of the world, always in a
worldly spirit, often in language that the child had been schooled to

think coarse, and sometimes with words that he knew to be sins in
themselves. Tenderness was the first duty, and my lord was invariably

harsh. God was love; the name of my lord (to all who knew him) was
fear. In the world, as schematised for Archie by his mother, the place

was marked for such a creature. There were some whom it was good to
pity and well (though very likely useless) to pray for; they were named

reprobates, goats, God's enemies, brands for the burning; and Archie
tallied every mark of identification, and drew the inevitable private

inference that the Lord Justice-Clerk was the chief of sinners.
The mother's honesty was scarce complete. There was one influence she

feared for the child and still secretly combated; that was my lord's;
and half unconsciously, half in a wilful blindness, she continued to

undermine her husband with his son. As long as Archie remained silent,
she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven and the child's

salvation; but the day came when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie
was seven, and beyond his years for curiosity and logic, when he brought

the case up openly. If judging were sinful and forbidden, how came papa
to be a judge? to have that sin for a trade? to bear the name of it for

a distinction?
"I can't see it," said the little Rabbi, and wagged his head.

Mrs. Weir abounded in commonplace replies.
"No, I cannae see it," reiterated Archie. "And I'll tell you what,

mamma, I don't think you and me's justifeed in staying with him."
The woman awoke to remorse, she saw herself disloyal to her man, her

sovereign and bread-winner, in whom (with what she had of worldliness)
she took a certain subdued pride. She expatiated in reply on my lord's

honour and greatness; his useful services in this world of sorrow and
wrong, and the place in which he stood, far above where babes and

innocents could hope to see or criticise. But she had builded too well
- Archie had his answers pat: Were not babes and innocents the type of

the kingdom of heaven? Were not honour and greatness the badges of the
world? And at any rate, how about the mob that had once seethed about

the carriage?
"It's all very fine," he concluded, "but in my opinion papa has no right

to be it. And it seems that's not the worst yet of it. It seems he's
called "The Hanging judge" - it seems he's crooool. I'll tell you what

it is, mamma, there's a tex' borne in upon me: It were better for that