A few days after we had taken up our residence at Judiville, as I was standing at the door of the store, with my hands behind, looking at the buildings, which were rising on every side, I saw Miss Volumnia Cockspur coming by herself towards the house. As she passed me to go in by the private door, I could see she was big with something important, for she eyed me askance, more sulkily than was graceful in any young lady, and very forbidding in her, whom at all other times I had respected as a comely and judicious maiden: moreover, to my blithe salutation she made no reply, but only a high-madam-ho signification that she recognised me.

“There's a gale in your tail,” said I to myself as she passed by, “light where it likes.”

It did not then strike me that Miss could be about any Machiavelian manoeuvre; indeed, she was the last young lady I would ever have supposed likely to be guilty of any sort of left-handed stratagem; she was at all times so fair and frank in her simplicity. I gave her at the same time credit only for a complimentary call on Mrs. Hoskins and my daughters, as they were new comers.

After she had been longer with them than they could well afford time from their thrift to spend in feminine frivolity, I began to conjecture with myself as to what could possibly be the object and purpose of her visit, when suddenly it came into my head that it might have some reference to her mother's proposed marriage. So, without more ado, bidding Charles to have an eye to the door, I walked round the corner, went up-stairs, and was presently in the midst of the ladies. I found my daughters and Miss Volumnia, like three heroines of a novel, bathed in tears, and Mrs. Hoskins sitting in the midst of them, knitting a comforter, and giving them good advice.

In the mean time, Amidab Peters, who was our guide from Olympus, with the two boys, was busy chopping down the trees on my farm, and preparing logs for a house; while I, as a boss on the roads, was receiving what would have been thought great wages in a town even in America. But the hard fare to which my duty subjected me, and the frequent instances in which I saw men pulled down with the hatchet in their hands by the ague, made the employment so unsatisfactory, that I resolved to retire from it, and give my whole attention to my own land, notwithstanding the infirm construction of my frame for the toil of clearing.

Moreover, by this time I had learned something of the expedients of settlers; and was convinced that girdling the trees is a quicker and better way for the first operations of new beginners, especially such as have had no experience of the woods, nor have been practised with the axe, than the laborious undertaking of hewing down each particular huge tree by itself. To girdle is to cut a ring round the bark of the trunk into the timber, which causes the tree to die: in the course of two or three years it falls; and being then well dried, is easily burnt off. As this work does not require a powerful arm, it suited me exactly.

As soon as a sufficient number of proper logs for my house had been prepared, and brought to the place by a team of oxen hired for the purpose, I made a bee; that is, I collected as many of the most expert and able-bodied of the settlers to assist at the raising, by which I got the walls of a most excellent house up in the course of a single day, without peril of life or limb among the workmen; a rare blessing, and, as I accepted it, a pleasant omen of happiness to those who were destined to be the inmates of the dwelling.

The search for the ‘global’ face of gothic demands that we address the relationship between gothic and folklore. Glennis Byron reminds us that ‘[a]s the global thrives on producing the local, commodifying it, and marketing it, so contemporary global Gothic increasingly appropriates and commodifies local or regional folklores’ (2012, 374). Asian Gothic is largely a product of such commodification – conceived of as an umbrella category encompassing a number of local or regional varieties of gothic, driven by a consistent flow of productions repackaging Asian folklore and urban legends for the global market, and frequently motivated by socio-cultural, economic or ecological shifts brought about by transnational relationships. Gothic is often said to have originated from folklore. Carina Hart has observed that gothic ‘shares many formal and conceptual features with folklore’ (2020, 1), appropriating folkloric figures and placing them within a gothic narrative framework (3). Manuel Aguirre has argued that as a genre, gothic ‘operates half-way between literature and folklore’ (2019, 171) and its function, at least to some extent, is to keep folklore alive (2013, 14).

Folklore itself is a rather complex category, as it encompasses not only a large body of oral and written texts, but also diverse beliefs and practices – it is not only a collection of antiquated lore, but also a lived experience. This experiential aspect of folklore has prompted Lorna Piatti-Farnell and Maria Beville to recognise ‘living Gothic’ – a formulation of gothic arising from ‘our engagements with the living past, within the experiential contexts of lived practice, and the legacies that it leaves to the living narratives of folklore and tradition’ (2014, 2). The study of Asian Gothic benefits from such an approach, as it allows us to acknowledge that many Asian texts exist in a symbiotic relationship with folklore past and present, and that it is the present form of folklore that often affects the local production and reception of these texts. Unsurprisingly also, it is the folklore side of Asian Gothic that most frequently ends up globalised.

This chapter discusses three major media forms that drive the globalisation of Asian Gothic: literature originally written in English, film, and original television series created specifically for global streaming platforms like Netflix, Amazon Prime or HBO Go.

The death of Mr. Herbert, apart altogether from the anguish of heart with which his sad and simple story affected all who knew him, was to me a great loss: happening so soon after my return, before there was time to fall into my wonted custom, it occasioned me a great deal of trouble. I could not, however, bring my mind to business while any thing remained to be done in his personal concerns; and had it not been for the kind conduct of Mr. Oliver Cockspur, who really acted as if he had been the son of the deceased, I would have found myself in no small measure of perplexity. For Mr. Herbert left several relations, and he had made a little money in the bank: after what I had advanced him was repaid, the adjustment, though a small affair, was most vexatious. However, Mr. Oliver took it off my hands, and managed it in the end to the satisfaction of all parties.

Another grievous tribulation arose from his loss as manager of the bank,—nowhere could his equal be found; and when I, at the request of Messrs. Haarlem and Breugle, stepped into his place until another could be got, the difficulty I felt myself in, on all points of the business, was unspeakable. Not that banking is a craft requiring a great stretch of understanding, for in that respect my store affairs were as the mysteries of Egypt, and needing the wisdom of the Chaldees’ excellence, as compared with it; but it demands a particularity of attention, which does not well accord with my nature;—in truth, it is a trade I never could highly venerate, having uniformly observed that bankers were a class of the commercial community more remarkable than any others for the narrowness of their knowledge, and the straitened circumstances of their intellectuals. However, there was I placed, by that mournful event, behind the bank counter, and so tethered to the spot that I had not a minute to spare for a crack with a neighbour, though his news were ever so interesting.“Well; he in time may cure to clear himself,

But at this instant he is sick, my Lord,

Of a strange fever.”

Passing by without further circumstantiality the matters of business, I ought, nevertheless, to notice that I narrowly escaped a tough lawsuit with the Albany Land Company, owing to the double dealing of John Waft, and it required some dexterity to get the matter amicably settled—in the end, however, settled it was; and by the time Mr. Hoskins was able to stir about again, the construction of the buildings for manufacturing the salt was actively undertaking. In the mean time the bailie had disappeared; he was never seen at Judiville from the day of our return from the lake; and it was reported, that in the expedition he had caught a severe cold, which made it doubtful if he would be able to weather the winter. It was on the day of Mr. Herbert's funeral that I first heard of his illness; but thinking it was only a cold by which he was affected, I paid no particular attention to the news.

When my tribulations began to subside, after the establishment of my brother in the bank, and I had leisure again to look about me, I missed the bodie, and heard with unfeigned concern that he was still far from being well. In fact, I never had thought there was much more the matter with him than shame for the way he had acted in the disposal of his discovery of the spring; and as the question respecting it between me and the company was adjusted, my wrath did not burn against him always, so that I would have been glad to have seen him on the old free terms of banter, give and take, in which we had so long lived.

But one day his wife, a shrewd old carlin as cunning as himself, came to our store, and after some loose talk about this and that, all to very little purpose, she began to wipe her eyes with the corner of her shawl, and to whine about the black prospect before her, and what would become of her if the gude man was taken away;

Arthur Conan Doyle's writing has always been popular, but until recent years it has received scant attention from scholars. Now that he is beginning to be recognized as one of the most important writers of his generation, and his books are not just widely read but studied by students and critics all over the world, the time is ripe for the first scholarly critical edition of Conan Doyle's works. Appropriately this is being undertaken by the Press of Edinburgh University, for he was a native of the city and a student of its university from 1876 to 1881.

While Conan Doyle is remembered primarily for the Sherlock Holmes stories, which defined the genre of crime fiction and introduced one of the world's best-known fictional characters, his contributions as a writer and as a public figure were astonishingly broad and diverse. He was a campaigner for justice, an advocate of sport, an indefatigable traveller, a propagandist for British wars, and a proselytiser of Spiritualism. His writing reflects this variety of experience. He wrote in the genres of science fiction, horror, ghost stories, medical realism, detective fiction, adventure fiction, military history, poetry, journalism and autobiography. There is a need for an accurate and authoritative edition of this body of writing, and the Edinburgh Conan Doyle will be unique as a series of critical editions of Conan Doyle's works.

He was a professional author, with no other source of income once he had made the momentous decision, in 1891, to retire from medicine and live by his pen. He belonged to a busy and sociable literary culture which served a well-educated reading public of unprecedented size. This public had an appetite for magazines, from the prestigious Cornhill to the popular Tit-Bits, and it was common for writers like Conan Doyle, with the help of the first generation of professional literary agents, to publish instalments of their work in periodical form before they appeared as books. Conan Doyle's own relationship with the Strand Magazine is well-known, but his work appeared in scores of serial outlets, and his books too came out under the imprint of dozens of publishers, on both sides of the Atlantic.

In North America, immigration can be a benchmark for understanding contemporary Christianity in relation to social justice and xenophobia. Since the first group of European immigrants arrived and settled on the continent, Christianity, as the dominant religion, has been constructed and understood within a society that practises policies against non-European immigrants. The immigration story of non-European Christians and their lived experiences have largely gone unheard. In the past they had been invisible and regarded as ‘the other’. The situation in the present is similar.

After removing the bar against non-European immigration in Canada in 1962 and in the USA in 1965, North America has become home to a great diversity of churches. Furthermore, due to globalisation and the neoliberal economy, more people migrated, and cosmopolitan cities such as New York, San Francisco, Toronto and Vancouver have become final destinations of a global cohort of immigrants, refugees and exiles. Now, in the twenty-first century, the Christianity of North America faces the task of building a sense of unity in Christ while fully acknowledging and addressing cultural difference and embracing the other.

As a way to comprehend the contemporary multicultural Christianity in North America, I apply the concept of borderlands, because a borderland indicates the liminal space where many different kinds of cultural expression are encountered, which can lead to unease, conflict and even violence. Yet, hope for transformation also arises. The process of creating the liminal space of encounter with the other invites Christians to fully understand the nature of xenophobia, which comes from the fear of the unfamiliar and the foreign other.

Immigration and Fear of the Other

Certain biases and fear of others, such as immigrants, people of colour and Indigenous peoples, has been pervasive in the entire history of mainstream North American culture and, more specifically, within the structure of the church. Christianity in North America has reflected and reacted to immigration in both the past and the present, which often results in racial injustice or the division of people and their particular communities. In the context of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the existential threat of climate change and frequent environmental crises, levels of anxiety about others have increased.

The courteous reader must have seen by this time, notwithstanding my juvenile indiscretion as a friend of the people, I was not naturally of a political turn: I had, indeed, from my first outset in life, too much to do in my private affairs, to have any leisure for meddling with those of the public. Thus it happened, that I took little interest in the principles of our newspaper, “The Judiville Jupiter;” I scarcely knew to which of the two great parties in the Union it was attached; all, in fact, that I did know, was, that the first editor, Dr. Murdoch, was a British republican, and that when he was sober he wrote clever articles to which I did not very strongly object, though I liked them better for their fond familiarity with old Scottish matters and things, than either for the argument or the language, though the latter was considered very good. When he was in his cups, there could not be a greater Herod for beheading; all who thought not as he thought, he regarded as delinquents that ought not to live; in verity, the paper was seldom in my hands.

It was not so with neighbour Semple; he was much of a politician, and of the democratic order; so were all the men about his mills; and of course he did not highly approve of the sentiments of the newspaper, which were more federal. This led him, now that the town had tripled in population since the establishment of “The Jupiter,” to concert with certain opulent new settlers for the establishment of another paper, which they called “The Chopper; or, The Oracle of the Woods,” and Mr. Dinleloof the schoolmaster, whom I have mentioned as a friend of the Ettrick Shepherd, recommended by Miss Beeny Needles to my patronage, was appointed the ostensible editor; the real editor, the writer of the leading and influential articles, was a Mr. Scholly, a clerk to the Mill Company, and who looked up to Mr. Semple as the friend that was to bring him forward in life.

Those who have judged my works of fiction, relative to the Scotch and Scottish history, as mere novels, have not done me quite justice. My endeavour has been to make such as are historical illustrative of the manners, the circumstances, and the characters of the ages to which the transactions belong; but if the object has not been so obvious as anticipated, still, if correct, it may be at last acknowledged. I have, doubtlessly, wasted my time in writing other books that do not deserve much approbation; but in all my works there has been a constant drawing from nature not altogether unsuccessful. The selection of models may not have been always judicious, in the opinion of my readers, but the truth and the resemblance have never been equivocal to myself.

“Lawrie Todd” is an attempt to describe the career of a Scotchman in the United States of America; but I do not think there is much difference in the rise and progress of a commercial adventurer in the New World from that of a similar character in the Old. As a settler in the woods, however, he is more remarkable: Europe affords no such situation, no such trial of ingenuity, no such test of the energy and the resources of character. I have, therefore, dwelt longer on the progress of settlement than was consistent with the narrative to which I have been much indebted; and have turned to account the result of enquiries and observations made for another purpose. The story is a fiction, but the incidents may be true; they are the result of hearsay and investigation.

I should ill discharge my duty to those who have favoured me with their attention, by omitting to relate the incident upon which the autobiography of Lawrie Todd has been constructed. I was sitting in the American Hotel, with my friend Captain Douglas, of the R. N., one Sunday evening, just before candles were brought into the room, when my servant announced a stranger in the gloom of the twilight.

The table that begins overleaf provides a quick-reference, country-by-country listing for Christianity and its major traditions for all the countries that appear in this volume. These statistics are found in the World Christian Database (see Methodology and Sources) and all figures relate to 1970 and 2020. Small numbers are left unrounded to distinguish known small populations from zero but do not represent precise estimates.

The columns are as follows:

• • Country (name of country in English)

• • Region in which country is located

• • Total population of country (United Nations estimate, 1970, 2020) and total numbers and percentage of population in each tradition

• • Percentage mean annual growth rate, 1970–2020.

The last page of the table presents regional totals.

‘Men Die of the diseases which they have studied most,’ remarked the surgeon, snipping off the end of a cigar with all his professional neatness and finish. ‘It's as if the morbid condition was an evil creature which, when it found itself closely hunted, flew at the throat of its pursuer. If you worry the microbes too much they may worry you. I’ve seen cases of it, and not necessarily in microbic diseases either. There was, of course, the well-known instance of Liston and the aneurism; and a dozen others that I could mention. You couldn't have a clearer case than that of poor old Walker of St Christopher’s. Not heard of it? Well, of course, it was a little before your time, but I wonder that it should have been forgotten. You youngsters are so busy in keeping up to the day that you lose a good deal that is interesting of yesterday.

‘Walker was one of the best men in Europe on nervous disease. You must have read his little book on sclerosis of the posterior columns. It's as interesting as a novel, and epoch-making in its way. He worked like a horse, did Walker—huge consulting practice—hours a day in the clinical wards—constant original investigations. And then he enjoyed himself also. “De mortuis,” of course, but still it's an open secret among all who knew him. If he died at forty-five, he crammed eighty years into it. The marvel was that he could have held on so long at the pace at which he was going. But he took it beautifully when it came.

‘I was his clinical assistant at the time. Walker was lecturing on locomotor ataxia to a wardful of youngsters. He was explaining that one of the early signs of the complaint was that the patient could not put his heels together with his eyes shut without staggering. As he spoke, he suited the action to the word. I don't suppose the boys noticed anything. I did, and so did he, though he finished his lecture without a sign.

I Used to be the leading practitioner of Los Amigos. Of course, everyone has heard of the great electrical generating gear there. The town is wide spread, and there are dozens of little townlets and villages all round, which receive their supply from the same centre, so that the works are on a very large scale. The Los Amigos folk say that they are the largest upon earth, but then we claim that for everything in Los Amigos except the gaol and the death-rate. Those are said to be the smallest.

Now, with so fine an electrical supply, it seemed to be a sinful waste of hemp that the Los Amigos criminals should perish in the old-fashioned manner. And then came the news of the electrocutions in the East, and how the results had not after all been so instantaneous as had been hoped. The Western Engineers raised their eyebrows when they read of the puny shocks by which these men had perished, and they vowed in Los Amigos that when an irreclaimable came their way he should be dealt handsomely by, and have the run of all the big dynamos. There should be no reserve, said the engineers, but he should have all that they had got. And what the result of that would be none could predict, save that it must be absolutely blasting and deadly. Never before had a man been so charged with electricity as they would charge him. He was to be smitten by the essence of ten thunderbolts. Some prophesied combustion, and some disintegration and disappearance. They were waiting eagerly to settle the question by actual demonstration, and it was just at that moment that Duncan Warner came that way.

Warner had been wanted by the law, and by nobody else, for many years. Desperado, murderer, train robber and road agent, he was a man beyond the pale of human pity. He had deserved a dozen deaths, and the Los Amigos folk grudged him so gaudy a one as that. He seemed to feel himself to be unworthy of it, for he made two frenzied attempts at escape. He was a powerful, muscular man, with a lion head, tangled black locks, and a sweeping beard which covered his broad chest. When he was tried, there was no finer head in all the crowded court.

A car screeches through busy downtown streets. Controlling a character who sits in the passenger seat, I look behind me and see a host of pursuing vehicles, their occupants climbing onto bonnets to leap in my direction with hostile intent. I take aim with a pistol, and a circular targeting pip flags up exactly when I should pump the trigger on my PS5 remote to blow out tyres and shoot the besuited enemies. The roof of the car I’m in is torn off during this combat, and now I must also contend with a helicopter launching a hail of rockets toward me. Upgrading to a larger weapon, I indiscriminately spray bullets everywhere in sight. The result is an immense explosion which seems to take out all adversaries and draw a line under this action sequence and section of gameplay.

At this point an onscreen logo – Unreal Engine 5 – comes and goes, and after this I float above the same city in which combat just took place (seemingly now clear of the explosions and rubble I so recently generated). Prompts invite me to ‘Toggle Mass AI Visualization’, ‘Toggle Day/Night’, or ‘Toggle Nanite Visualization’, while accompanying text states seemingly related concurrent information about ‘automatic open world streaming’, ‘dynamic global illumination and reflections’, ‘rule based object placement’, ‘particle system’, ‘virtualized geometry’, ‘procedural audio generation’, and more. Pressing x on the controller indeed toggles these values, making traffic appear and disappear, altering the time of the world from midday brightness to night-time halogen glow, or even rendering the entire, extremely verisimilitudinous world into a fractal, primary-coloured cavalcade of tes-sellated triangles (Figures C1a–b). After this aerial sweep, I am plunged back to street-level, where I control a character who can walk, run, and drive through this Western metropolis. No longer pursued by agents, possible activities to undertake are suggested by map markers (if I reach them I will gain access to more toggling options), but instrumental task completion does not seem to be the primary purpose of this world. Rather, these streets seem to be about wandering and languid aesthetic appreciation – I am invited to be awed at the size of this map, the realism of the physics, the scale of the AI, the quality of the audio, and so on.

As his copies of Millais's The Blind Girl and Millet's The Gleaners testify, Warwick was a self-taught artist who, in order to learn how to paint, carefully copied and reproduced masterpieces of the past. Warwick took inspiration from English (the topographical draughtsmen, Turner or Millais), French (Millet) and German (Dürer) masters alike and Walcott's own apprenticeship as a painter but also, crucially, as a poet, developed along similar lines: ‘The whole course of imitations and adaptations was simply a method of apprenticeship’, he declared in a 1977 interview: ‘I knew I was copying and imitating and learning … I knew I had to absorb everything’. This ‘everything’ created a complex cluster of often contradictory interests, passions and affiliations. Falling in love with ‘English’ as the colonial empire was fading and at a time of cultural decolonisation, the young Walcott learnt English and American poetry but also the Classics and French literature at school at the same time in which he was exposed to St Lucia's multi-layered colonial (French and English) and linguistic heritage (Kweyol and the English continuum).

In ‘Outside the Cathedral’, Walcott recalls that, growing up as a Methodist on a Catholic island, he was socialised into thinking that both the local French-based Creole or Kweyol everyone spoke in the streets and the Latin used for the Mass by the Catholic majority were ‘languages of superstition’, ‘resignation’ or ‘unquestioning acceptance’ (OTC18). Nevertheless, he insists, if his Methodist chapel ‘was a little fort that defended the English language’, Latin and Kweyol always remained ‘potently seductive’ for him (OTC18). Walcott also proclaims that if he used to revere the topographical draughtsmen his father admired, he considered ‘contemptible’ ‘almost every English painter, except Turner and Constable’ (OTC21, 23) and he might have felt encouraged, as a St Lucian watercolourist, by the introductory chapter of Finberg's English Water Colour Painters which Warwick is likely to have owned and father and son to have read. Finberg begins by highlighting that, despite being prepared to accept that the ‘English school of painters in water colour deserves to be studied as a valuable expression of national character’, he thoroughly rejected the ‘patriotic’ notion – supported, for example, by Samuel Redgrave – that watercolour painting is a ‘peculiarly English art’.

Good Morning (Ohayō, 1959), Ozu Yasujirō's second production in colour, is generally recognised by historians as a loose remake of I Was Born, But… (Otona no miru ehon: Umarete wa mita keredo), his 1932 silent film. Both films showcase an interest in media, largely through the perspective of their two young protagonists. In I Was Born, But…, two children experience a rude awakening through the projection of a kogata-eiga (small-gauge film), and in Good Morning television prompts a process of mediation between the private and public spheres. In the former, notwithstanding class consciousness, a collective form of watching also gives rise to spectatorial awareness. Similarly, in the latter, despite the advent of a technology that allows media consumption in private spaces, it is public viewership that undergoes a process of domestication. Seen in this light, this chapter argues that the concept of the remake is not just a matter of underlining affinities between the films, but also of ‘de-mediation’. Although Ozu's films often defy Hollywood conventions (in terms of their formal, structural, and stylistic features), and do not follow the same commercial logic, this chapter nonetheless discusses them along the lines of Frank Kelleter's consideration of remakes and popular seriality. Rather than progressive ontological theorisation, however, I highlight aspects in the films that illustrate a devolving phenomenology. That is, instead of paying attention to technological improvements, I underscore features that demonstrate dysfunctional forms of communication and archaic modes of media consumption. This is neither a critique of Ozu or the films, nor is it an abstract statement on media as such that can be seen emerging from them. Indeed, the films equally employ nonsensical and even flat-out infantile humour that seem to lampoon critical thinking.

However, infantility does not mean insensitivity. In fact, it suggests hypersensitivity, even if to the extent of ludicrousness. In an influential article, Thomas Elsaesser asks half-jokingly (and answers positively) whether Freud's discussion of the ‘mystic writing pad’ (what Elsasser calls ‘essentially a child's toy’ [2009, 102]) can be considered a theoretical deliberation of media. Following a similar line of thought (albeit in reverse), this chapter argues that Ozu's remaking of I Was Born, But… (the full title dubs it as an ‘Adult's Picture Book’) is indicative of a Freudian unconsciousness of Japanese viewership.

Professor Ainslie Grey had not come down to breakfast at the usual hour. The presentation chiming-clock which stood between the terracotta busts of Claude Bernard and of John Hunter upon the dining-room mantelpiece had rung out the half-hour and the three-quarters. Now its golden hand was verging upon the nine, and yet there were no signs of the master of the house.

It was an unprecedented occurrence. During the twelve years that she had kept house for him, his youngest sister had never known him a second behind his time. She sat now in front of the high silver coffeepot, uncertain whether to order the gong to be resounded or to wait on in silence. Either course might be a mistake. Her brother was not a man who permitted mistakes.

Miss Ainslie Grey was rather above the middle height, thin, with peering, puckered eyes, and the rounded shoulders which mark the bookish woman. Her face was long and spare, flecked with colour above the cheek-bones, with a reasonable, thoughtful forehead, and a dash of absolute obstinacy in her thin lips and prominent chin. Snow-white cuffs and collar, with a plain dark dress, cut with almost Quaker-like simplicity, bespoke the primness of her taste. An ebony cross hung over her flattened chest. She sat very upright in her chair, listening with raised eyebrows, and swinging her eye-glasses backwards and forwards with a nervous gesture which was peculiar to her.

Suddenly she gave a sharp, satisfied jerk of the head, and began to pour out the coffee. From outside there came the dull thudding sound of heavy feet upon thick carpet. The door swung open, and the Professor entered with a quick, nervous step. He nodded to his sister, and seating himself at the other side of the table, began to open the small pile of letters which lay beside his plate.

Professor Ainslie Grey was at that time forty-three years of age—nearly twelve years older than his sister. His career had been a brilliant one. At Edinburgh, at Cambridge, and at Vienna he had laid the foundations of his great reputation, both in physiology and in zoology.

It will be recollected, when I last had occasion to speak of Mr. Oliver Cockspur, he was on horseback, and off at a Canterbury-trot to see Mr. Herbert: what passed between them I have now to describe, for Mr. Herbert told me all the particulars; and I will endeavour to do so with as much brevity as is consistent with perspicuity.

Mr. Oliver found the old gentleman in the midst of his school, patiently enduring the yells in which an ignoble abcedarian, of six years, was endeavouring to express the alphabet. The young gentleman halted as he entered, and hastily threw his eyes around. He seemed a good deal affected by the scene before him; and when he went up to address the master, his emotion rendered his voice broken and indistinct.

“Although I ought to have been prepared for this,” said he, “yet the place is much meaner than I expected; and, my God! Mr. Herbert, you reduced to the necessity of stooping to sow the sand, and wash the Ethiopians of beggary; for these poor creatures seem of no better parentage.”

“I thank you, Mr. Oliver, for this kind visit,” was the reply; “one must not examine too curiously the gifts of fortune. Their value can only be ascertained by comparison; and I should account myself ungrateful, if, in my present condition, humble as it is, I did not feel I had received promotion. Four years ago, I came here to construct a cabin for my old age; but my arms could ill perform the toil of the axeman, and my hands, by their blisters, taught me that I was too late for the task. My heart was sinking, when, in a fortunate moment, Mr. Todd proposed to me this business. Unmeet as it may seem to my past habits, I have never repined that my lot should have been cast so lowly; for it better suits my age and my infirmities, than the ineffectual endeavour to earn a morsel by hard labour. To be enabled to become what you see I am, was a golden redemption.