and feeling, Irving resolved, in his half desperation and momentary recklessness, to take the first which left the quay, and leaping listlessly into this, found it Irish, and bound for Belfast. The voyage was accomplished in safety, but not without an adventure at the end. Some notable crime had been perpetrated in Ireland about that time, the doer of which was still at large, filling the minds of the people with dreams of capture, and suspicions of every stranger. Of all the strangers entering that port of Belfast, perhaps there was no one so remarkable as this tall Scotchman, with his knapsack and slender belongings, his extraordinary powerful frame, and his total ignorance of the place, who was travelling without any feasible motive or object. The excited authorities found the circumstances so remarkable, that they laid suspicious hands upon the singular stranger, who was only freed from their surveillance by applying to the Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Mr. Hanna, who liberated his captive brother and took him home with Irish frankness. That visit was a jubilee for the children of the house. Black melancholy and disgust had fled before the breezes at sea, and the amusing but embarrassing contretemps on land; and Irving's heart, always open to children, expanded at once for the amusement of the children of that house. One of those boys was the Rev. Dr. Hanna of Edinburgh, the biographer, and son-in-law of Chalmers, who, at the distance of so many years, remembers the stories of the stranger thus suddenly brought to the fireside, and his genial, cordial presence which charmed the house.

After this the young man wandered over the north of

Ireland, as he had often wandered over the congenial districts of his own country, for some weeks; pursuing the system he had learned to adopt at home,-walking as the crow flies, finding lodging and shelter in the wayside cottages, sharing the potato and the milk which formed the peasant's meal. A singular journey; performed in primitive hardship, fatigue, and brotherly kindness; out of the reach of civilised persons or conventional necessities; undertaken out of pure caprice, the evident sudden impulse of letting things go as they would; and persevered in with something of the same abandon and determined abstraction of himself from all the disgusts and disappointments of life. Neither letters nor tokens of his existence seem to have come out of this temporary flight and banishment. He had escaped for the moment from those momentous questions which shortly must be faced and resolved. Presently it would be necessary to go back, to make the last preparations, to take the decisive steps, and say the farewells. He fairly ran away from it for a moment's breathing time, and took refuge in the rude unknown life of the Irish cabins ;-a -a thing which most people have somehow done, or at least attempted to do, at the crisis of their lives.

When he re-emerged out of this refreshing blank, and came to the common world again, where letters and ordinary appeals of life were awaiting him, he found a bulky enclosure from his father, in the Coleraine postoffice. Gavin Irving wrote, in explanation of his double letter (for postage was no trifle in those days), that he would have copied the enclosed if he could have read it; but not being able to make out a word, was com

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INVITATION TO GLASGOW.

pelled to send it on for his son's own inspection. This enclosure was from Dr. Chalmers, inviting Irving to go to Glasgow; but the date was some weeks back, and the invitation was by no means distinct as to the object for which he was wanted. It was enough, however, to stir the reviving heart of the young giant, whom his fall, and contact with kindly mother earth, had refreshed and re-invigorated. He set out without loss of time for Glasgow, but only to find Dr. Chalmers absent, and once more to be plunged into the lingering pangs of suspense.

While waiting the Doctor's return, Irving again reported himself and his new expectations to his friends in Kirkcaldy.

"Glasgow, 1st September, 1819.

"You see I am once more in Scotland; and how I came to have found my way to the same place I started from, you shall now learn. On Friday last arrived at Coleraine a letter from Dr. Chalmers, pressing me to meet him in Edinburgh on the 30th, or in Glasgow the 31st Aug. So here I arrived, after a very tempestuous passage in the Rob Roy; and upon calling on the Doctor, I find he is still in Anstruther, at which place he proposes remaining awhile longer than he anticipated, and requests to have a few days of me there. So, but for another circumstance, you might have seen me posting through Kirkcaldy to Anster, the famed in song. That circumstance is Mrs. Chalmers's ill-health, of which he will be more particularly informed than he is at present by this post; and then Miss Pratt tells me there is no doubt he will return post-haste, as all good husbands ought. Here, then, I am, a very sorry sight, I can assure you. You may remember how disabled in my rigging I was in the Kingdom*; conceive

* The Kingdom of Fife, fondly so called by its affectionate poptilation.

INTEREST IN CHURCH AFFAIRS.

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me, then, to have wandered a whole fortnight among the ragged sons of St. Patrick, to have scrambled about the Giant's Causeway, and crossed the Channel twice, and sailed in fish-boats and pleasure-boats, and driven gigs and jaunting-cars, and never once condescended to ask the aid of a tailor's needle. Think of this, and figure what I must be now. But I have just been ordering a refit from stem to stern, and shall by tomorrow be able to appear amongst the best of them; and you know the Glasgow bodies ken fu' weel it's merely impossible to carry about with ane a' the comforts of the Sa't Market at ane's tail, or a' the comforts of Bond Street either. I shall certainly now remain till I have seen and finally determined with Dr. Chalmers; for my time is so short that if I get home without a finale of one kind or other, it will interfere with the department of my foreign affairs, which imperiously call for attention."

The letter, which begins thus, is filled up, to the length of five long pages, by an account of the organisation of the Synod of Ulster, and of a case of discipline which had just occurred in it, on which, on behalf of a friend at Coleraine, the traveller was anxious to consult the experience of the minister of Kirkcaldy. In respect to his own prospects, Irving's suspense was now speedily terminated. Dr. Chalmers returned, and at once proposed to him to become his assistant in St. John's. The solace to the young man's discouraged mind must have been unspeakable. Here, at last, was one man who understood the unacceptable probationer, and perceived in him that faculty which he himself discerned dimly and still hoped in-troubled, but not convinced by the general disbelief. To have his gift recognised by another mind was new life to Irving; and such a mind! the generous intelligence of the first of Scotch preachers. But with Presbyterian scrupulosity, in the

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DOUBTFUL OF HIS OWN SUCCESS.

midst of his eagerness, Irving hung back still. He could not submit to be "intruded upon " the people by the mere will of the incumbent, and would not receive even that grateful distinction, if he continued as distasteful as he had hitherto found himself. He was not confident of his prospects even when backed by the powerful encouragement of Dr. Chalmers. "I will preach to them if you think fit," he is reported to have said; "but if they bear with my preaching, they will be the first people who have borne with it!" In this spirit, with the unconscious humility of a child, sorry not to satisfy his judges, but confessing the failure which he scarcely could understand, he preached his first sermon to the fastidious congregation in St. John's. This was in October 1819. "He was generally well liked, but some people thought him rather flowery. However, they were satisfied that he must be a good preacher, since Dr. Chalmers had chosen him," says a contemporary witness. It was thus with little confidence on his own part, and somewhat careless indulgence on the part of the people, who were already in possession of the highest preaching of the time, that Irving opened his mouth at last, and began his natural career.