Perthshire in bygone days

LAWBENCE MACDONALD. 115
CHAPTER XIX.
LAWBENCE MACDONALD— continued.
I shall look back, when on the main
Back to my native isle,
And fondly think I hear again
Thy voice, and see thee s mil e."
Man takes an active hand in the weaving of his own
destiny, and a singular web he frequently makes of it.
One buzzes round his birthplace as a fly buzzes round a
lighted candle, never going far from home, — vegetating on
his little acre, — reading his Bible and his weekly paper, —
toiling, moiling, — and when he dies, the parish mortcloth
would reach from his cradle to his grave. Another goes
out into the world, acquires a fortune, returns at middle
life, sets up as the magnate of his native village, or perhaps
lord of the manor. A third leaves the home of his birth to
realise fond aspirations, covers himself with gold, and never
returns. He who has been away twenty years may come
back and live happily ; but he that has been away thirty,
is irrecoverable. He has become naturalised in his far-
away home, and, though he were returning, it would be to
dwell amongst strangers.
Mr. M'Currach, late of Berth, builder, was the first to
put a mell into the hands of young Macdonald, and when
he did so, perhaps he had less confidence in his sturdy
young protege, with his fancies and quiddities, becoming
expert at the plummet and square, than Mr. Gillespie
Grseme had in counselling and assisting him to enter
the lists against Thorvalsden and Gibson. In the latter
adventure Macdonald himself had confidence ; and if he
did succeed in becoming the best portrait-sculptor of his
time, the outside world knows little of the embarrassing,
despairing moments that assailed him in the pursuit of this
most difficult branch of art. In all his early modellings,
the human face, with its never-ending peculiarities, was his
favourite study; and when he came to adopt the sculptor's
i2