asserted spoil,
             And lead oblivion into day?
                                                                      Langhorne.
 
»Most readers,« says the Manuscript of Mr. Pattieson, »must have witnessed with
delight the joyous burst which attends the dismissing of a village-school on a
fine summer evening. The buoyant spirit of childhood, repressed with so much
difficulty during the tedious hours of discipline, may then be seen to explode,
as it were, in shout and song, and frolic, as the little urchins join in groups
on their playground, and arrange their matches of sport for the evening. But
there is one individual who partakes of the relief afforded by the moment of
dismission, whose feelings are not so obvious to the eye of the spectator, or so
apt to receive his sympathy. I mean the teacher himself, who, stunned with the
hum, and suffocated with the closeness of his schoolroom, has spent the whole
day (himself against a host) in controlling petulance, exciting indifference to
action, striving to enlighten stupidity, and labouring to soften obstinacy; and
whose very powers of intellect have been confounded by hearing the same dull
lesson repeated a hundred times by rote, and only varied by the various blunders
of the reciters. Even the flowers of classic genius, with which his solitary
fancy is most gratified, have been rendered degraded, in his imagination, by
their connection with tears, with errors, and with punishment; so that the
Eclogues of Virgil and Odes of Horace are each inseparably allied in association
with the sullen figure and monotonous recitation of some blubbering schoolboy.
If to these mental distresses are added a delicate frame of body, and a mind
ambitious of some higher distinction than that of being the tyrant of childhood,
the reader may have some slight conception of the relief which the solitary
walk, in the cool of a fine summer evening, affords to the head which has ached,
and the nerves which have been shattered, for so many hours, in plying the
irksome task of public instruction.
    To me these evening strolls have been the happiest hours of an unhappy life;
and if any gentle reader shall hereafter find pleasure in perusing these
lucubrations, I am not unwilling he should know that the plan of them has been
usually traced in those moments when relief from toil and clamour, combined with
the quiet scenery around me, has disposed my mind to the task of composition.
    My chief haunt, in these hours of golden leisure, is the banks of the small
stream, which, winding through a lone vale of green bracken, passes in front of
the village schoolhouse of Gandercleugh. For the first quarter of a mile