The house in which Carlyle was born will probably be preserved as a monument-perhaps with a library in it for the neighborhood. There could be none better. In this small house his parents, at his birth, were only able to occupy two rooms. That in which the great man was born is humble enough, lit by one little window-the bed built into the wall. The rooms are now occupied by the sexton who dug his grave.

Between that small room where Carlyle first saw the light, and that smaller grave which hides him from the light, it is hardly a hundred steps: yet what a life-pilgrimage lies between those terms! what stretches of noble years, of immense labors, of invincible days rising from weary nights, mark the fourscore years and five that led from the stonemason's threshold to a hero's tomb!

What could his parents give him? An ever-present sense of an invisible world, of which this life is the threshold—a world of transcendent joys marking the crown which the universe prepares for virtue, with an underside of unspeakable pains which mark the eternal brand fixed on evil-doing. Of this world they could teach him little, only that it was a place of brief probation by suffering and self-denial. For the rest they can only send him to a poor little school hard by. It, and Ecclefechan influences generally, are travestied in the experiences of Herr Teufels

dröckh in his native "Entepfuhl." "Of the insignificant portion of my education which depended on schools," he says, "there need almost no notice be taken. I learned what others learn, and kept stored by in a corner of my head, seeing as yet no manner of use in it."

But, meanwhile, there is another university than that at Edinburgh, and little Thomas is already studying in it more deeply than pedagogue or parent suspects. That university is the universe itself, and little by little he finds that Ecclefechan is a centre of it. The little burn runs before the door; as he wades in it the brook whispers of its course as it passes on to the river, on to the sea, out into the universe. The swallows come from afar-from Africa and other regions-to nestle in the eaves of the house. The stage-coach, as it comes and departs, becomes mystical to the lad when he learns that it connects the village with distant cities, and is weaving human habitations together like a shuttle. The village road leads to the end of the world.

On the day before the funeral I went out to Craigenputtoch, the name of the solitude in whose one house Carlyle and his wife began life together. The nearest railway-station is about ten miles distant from the place, and, as I was warned, affords no means of conveyance, so I started in a carriage to drive over the fifteen miles of country road. It is

a pilgrimage not without way-side shrines. Dumfries, to begin with, is the town of Robert Burns, who died July 21, 1796, when Carlyle was in his eighth month. Here, in the church-yard, is the beautiful monument of Burns: the Muse touches him on the shoulder as he holds the plough. On the outward road we pause at Iron Gray Church to see the tomb which Sir Walter Scott erected over Helen Walker, whom he had made the friend and exemplar of many children under the name of Jeannie Deans, the girl who would not swerve from verbal truth to save her sister's life, but did journey to London on foot to save her. The epitaph bids the wayfarer "Respect the grave of poverty when combined with love of truth and dear affection." much farther on is the solitary monument of the old decipherer of mossy epitaphs, "Old Mortality." Now and then a stately old mansion is passed, and some cultured vales, but at length the road enters upon a wild, bleak country. The snow covers the desolate moors; the road is stony; but it is all picturesque as I remember how along every mile of it Emerson drove in a gig to clasp heart and hand of his young intellectual brother forty-eight years before. "I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart." And now, too, I found it, the home of a kindly shepherd and his family. Arthur Johnstone-Douglas, of Glen

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