quadrupeds as on bipeds. I fell in here with a handsome and sensible young woman from Aberdeenshire, whose maiden name was Mitchel. She was very happily married to a medical gentleman in this neighbourhood. Her father, who was a man of some property, was very religious, and had prayers in his family regularly every evening and morning. Having four daughters, he firmly resolved, that as every person not only ought to pray, but not to be ashamed to pray, and as no one could be the worthy master of a family without offering up the prayers of the family, so none should gain his consent to marry his daughters till he heard them pray, and approved of their talents in this exercise. His daughters being all of them handsome, and tolerably well educated, had many of the young men as suitors: but as none of them would say prayers before him, he dismissed them all.

After the young women, especially the eldest, had been long teazed with this conduct of her father's, and had used many arguments on her part to shew that a young man might be a good man, and make a good-enough husband, though he could not say long prayers in the family, at length a genteel, wellbred young man fell in love with her, and came frequently to the house to see her. Her father suspected the young man's intentions, but said nothing. At length, the young man, having got the young woman's consent, one evening after tea, while walking in the garden, told the father his intention, who seemed not to disapprove of it. When they went in, it being summer, and near the hour of per, the young woman's father, as usual, ordered the Bible and psalm books to be brought. This being

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done, he asked the young man to read and sing a portion of the Psalms, which the young man declined doing, on the ground that he could not sing. Having read a chapter from the Bible, he then desired the young man to say prayers, which he also declined, upon the ground that he was not much in the practice of saying prayers in public. Prayers being over, they went out to walk while the cloth was laying for supper. "Hark ye, young man," said the father, "I have no objections to your age, your appearance, nor your fortune, but I desire you never to enter my house as a suitor for my daughter's affections, till you have not only learned to pray to your God, but also not to be ashamed to do it in public." The young man took this address of the father so much amiss, that he went and said to the young woman, Farewell, and never entered the house again.

The young woman, who was angry, and remonstrated with her father on his having so often disappointed her, had this reply: "Trust in God, he will send you a husband that can pray." Nobody asked her in marriage for some time, and she was, as they vulgarly say, at her last prayers. However, a physician recommended it to her youngest sister, for some complaint, to go to Pitkethley Wells, and her eldest sister went to accompany her. During the six weeks they staid at Pitkethley, where there are often public dances and meetings of various kinds, a young gentleman of property and amiable manners saw her, fell in love with her, and carried her home in his carriage with her sister, near a hundred miles, to her father's, to obtain his consent. This young lover did not need to be asked to

pray, but proposed to perform this duty; which, having done to the father's satisfaction, he consented to the marriage, and they have children and are happy, as already mentioned.

I was sorry to find, not only here but almost every where, numbers of old bachelors and men, who, though they are evidently in easy circumstances and able to support a family, yet do not choose to do it. There must be something wrong in the laws of the country, or the morals of the age, that men so reluctantly enter the pale of matrimony. Athenus, an antient historian, tells us, that, in Grecce, women took old bachelors, and dragged them yearly round the altars, beating them with their fists, that this, if no other motive, might induce them to marry; and this, he tells us, had often the desired effect. What would the old bachelors say, were they tossed in a blanket every year by the women in the parish till they were persuaded to marry?

Leaving Pitkethley, I went by the bridge of Erne, below which I observed some vessels laden with lime, and others with coals, to Perth. After crossing the Erne, the road runs to the north-west under the base of the hill of Moncrieff, and passes by a pretty steep ascent to the cloven crags where art has assisted nature in carrying this great military highway through the ridge that tapers off from the hill of Moncrieff. Arrived at this height, where the road declines on the one hand to the south, and on the other to the north, I turned about, and surveyed once more the delightful valley of Stratherne; of which I shall only say, in addition to all

I have ready observed, that it was antiently a principality or county palatine, and the inheritance of the royal family that succeeded to the Bruces in Scotland. It still gives a title to one of our princes of the blood royal. When Edward III. ruled over, at intervals, the low country of Scotland, his headquarters being at Perth, we find among his barons "John lord Warren, eldest son to John Plantagenet, late earl of Warren, Stratherne, and Surrey." Recollecting that this was the place for ascending the hill of Moncrieff, or, as it is called in Chartularies and other old writings, Moredun, I rode back a little way to a little village, called, I think, Road End, where there is a Seceder kirk, and what we would call in England a hedge ale-house, where I put up my horse, and proceeded from thence towards the summit of the hill, by a very gradual ascent, through thriving plantations of wood, and at every step having a clearer and clear prospect of the objects at hand, as it were, or below me. The town and the bridge of Perth, stretched boldly across the indignant Tay, though a noble as well as pleasing prospect, ceased for a time to attract my regard, when I had a clear, and, indeed, very near prospect of the majestic cliff of Kinnoull, rising perpendicularly six hundred and fifty feet from the road that runs close by its base and the Tay. This hill has an inexhaustible store of fine pebbles, a kind of agates, or, perhaps, cornelians. But in surveying this sublime crag, one does not think of such trifling ornaments, but is lost in

• Tao indignanti, &c. inscribed on the bridge of Aberfeldie.