"I never enjoyed anything more in my life," said Mr. Forrester, who on

that occasion had been Miss Ormiston's escort through the streets, in

which they lost their party, and had the supreme bliss of wandering

together in the crowd, when Mr. Forrester almost forgot that Miss

Ormiston was a goddess with five thousand earthly charms, and Miss

Ormiston had compared his merits as a guide and protector with those

of her brothers, and found he was much more considerate, and made her

wish law, which they were often far from doing. In point of fact, a

thaw had been very imminent, but, alas! since then a sharp frost had

set in between them, as unaccountably as frosts frequently do set in.

"I think, now," said Mrs. Parker, "a fine old castle like this ought

to have had a grander name: don't you think so, Miss Ormiston?"

"Yes, I do, and it had, originally. There was a monastery here at one

time, over in that field with the trees in the corner of it: it was

called the abbey of Cakeholy, and when the castle was built it got the

name of Cakeholy Castle, after the abbey. The name Cakeholy, tradition

says, arose from the fact that an extraordinary saint, whose wants had

been relieved at the monastery, blessed all the bread that should ever

be baked there, and the bread ever after had a great sustaining power

in it; so that pilgrims from Edinburgh and the North, going to the

southern shrines, all passed this way to get themselves supplied with

the holy cakes. At the Reformation the abbey was destroyed, and became

a ruin haunted by owls, so that, partly in derision and partly as

suiting the altered circumstances, the common people corrupted the

name into Cockhoolet; and in process of time it was given to the

castle also, and stuck to it. That is the history of a name which is

certainly neither romantic, nor high-sounding."

"How interesting!" said Mrs. Parker. "If I were you, I would go back

to the old name: there is a reverence about it there is not about the

other. Only think of bands of pilgrims coming across the moor there!"

"Yes, in their gowns and rope girdles, with wallets and

scallop-shells," said Bessie. "It must have been a curious old world

then: one could sit here and muse by the hour on all that has come and

gone. I often bring up my work or my book here in summer and think of

it."

"I do like old things," said Mrs. Parker, "and old families and old

names. Our name, for instance, has no smack of age about it, and it is

so short and perky: it must have been given to some one who had to do

with parks."

"But parks may be a very old institution," said Bessie, "if we looked

into the thing, though not so old as Forrester: that is an ancient

name," glancing at Edwin, who was leaning against a sentry-box

listening and watching the sun putting out the lights in his

bed-chamber; "yet not nearly so ancient as Ormiston. I always feel

it is fitting we should live in an old castle, we are so ancient

ourselves."

"Are we?" said John: "I never knew that before."

"Ormiston," she said, "is perhaps as pure a Saxon word as now exists.

It was during the Roman invasion our ancestor led an army through a

dense mist against the invaders: just as he came up with them the sun

shone out and the mist. The legions were taken by surprise, for the

advancing enemy had been hidden by the mist, and they were utterly

routed. The Saxon king--"

"What was his name?" asked John.

"John," she said, "don't seek to be wise above what is revealed. The

king called our ancestor to the front and made him earl of Ormiston on

the spot--'Gold-Mist-on;' that is, 'Be ever in the van;' and a proud

race were the earls of Ormiston, and well they answered to the name.

But their fortunes waned when the modern upstart, the Norman William,

laid his greedy hands on everything for himself and his mob of

pirates, and at present we are only middle-class people, but our blood

must be the bluest of the blue."

"Mine must be as blue," said Edwin, "for the Forresters came in with

the trees, and the trees were early settlers."

"But the mists were first by a very long time," answered Bessie.

"I don't believe that story," said John. "I have read about the

Cakeholy business somewhere, but you have made that Or-Mist-on affair

out of your own head: isn't that true, Bessie?"

"I am not bound to answer unbelievers, John."

"Besides," said John, "Ormiston is far; liker French than Saxon."

"Mr. Parker," said Bessie, "there was an abbot John of Cakeholy who

flourished in the thirteenth century: his ghost is said to revisit its

old habitation, or rather the place where it stood. I should like to

meet it and have a talk over things; it would be very interesting."

"Would you not be terrified?" asked Mrs. Parker.

"If I saw what I believed to be a ghost, I should die of terror," said

Bessie; "especially if I was alone and it was the dead of night; but I

have no faith whatever in ghosts."

"It is getting rather chilly," said Mrs. Parker.

"Perhaps we had better go down now, then," Miss Ormiston said. "Mr.

Forrester, would you come out of your brown study and let us pass?"

"Certainly. I'll see you all safe off the battlements. I wasn't in a

brown study: I was in a mist."

"Then take care: people in a mist always think they are going the

right way when they are going directly wrong."

"If I only knew the right way!" he said.

"That's true, Mr. Forrester," said Mrs. Parker. "If we only knew the

right way; and people tell you to be guided by Providence, but I say

I never know when it is Providence and when it is myself;" and she

threaded her way down the narrow stairs, followed by the rest of the

party.

III.

The dining-room, with its low roof, its crimson walls, dark furniture

and handsome fire (the fires at Cockhoolet were always handsome:

Bessie was the architect and superintended the building herself; they

never looked harum-scarum nor meaningless nor thoughtless, nor as if

they were not meant to burn; they combined taste, comfort, and, as a

consequence, economy; everything tasteful and comfortable is in the

long run economical), its table-cloth, glistening like the summit of

the Alps and laden with good things, looked a place where people even

not in love with each other might, unless naturally perverse, be very

happy.

Mrs. Parker, being from town, was in raptures with every country

eatable, especially the scones, which she found were manufactured by

Miss Ormiston herself.

"And have they," asked Mr. Parker, "the sustaining power that the

cakes made here of old had?"

"If you eat enough of them you may get to Edinburgh to-night before

you are very hungry," said John.

"The abbey cakes were unleavened," Bessie explained, "which these are

not, so that they are less substantial fare."

"What do you raise them with?" asked Mrs. Parker.

"Butter, milk and carbonate of soda," said Miss Ormiston.

"We call Bessie a doctor of the Carbon," said John: "she makes very

good scones, although you would hardly go from here to Canterbury on

the strength of one of them."

"Mr. Forrester, are you dull?" asked Jessie: "you are not saying

anything."

"I am too busy eating the holy cakes, Jessie," said Edwin: "your

sister is a master in her art."

"I say," Jessie went on, "are you ever dull at home? When I told

Bessie that you had come she was surprised, and said that you must

surely be dull at home. I am sorry for you if you are: you should come

here oftener--we are never dull here."

"Perhaps," said Edwin, "your sister thinks I come too often, as it

is."

Bessie was so deeply engaged pressing Mr. Parker to eat strawberry

jam, with cheeks the color of the fruit, that of course she could not

have heard what her sister had been saying.

"Oh no, I don't think she thinks that at all," Jessie said: "we never

think any one can come too often. Bessie, can Mr. Forrester come too

often?"

But still Miss Ormiston was so occupied with Mr. Parker that she did

not hear.

And Mrs. Parker said, "It is a most intensely interesting old place,

this: do not people come to look at it?"

"Oh yes," replied Bessie, "especially in summer: we generally have

several parties every week. One of the servants takes them over the

castle--grand people often, with carriages and livery servants."

"Do you not keep a book for them to write their names in?"

"No, we have never done that."

"I would do it if I were you: it would be interesting to know who

comes and how many. Why, very remarkable people may have been here

without your knowing."

"I doubt we are not sufficiently alive to our privileges," Bessie

said.

"It's fine moonlight," said the boys, who, seeing that they and every

one had ceased eating, were impatient to be out again. "Come, Mr.

Parker, we'll show you the echo: Mr. Forrester, come."

"I'll go too," said Mrs. Parker; and they all went but the Rose, who

stayed behind for a little to direct about household matters.

The echo was a favorite with the boys, it gave such unlimited scope

to their powers of shouting: it was the _sight_ they most enjoyed

exhibiting to strangers. And it was an echo that could repeat every

word of a sentence with such perfection that it was difficult to

believe that it was not a human being shouting back from the

other side of the park, where stood some houses inhabited by the

farm-servants and their families.

"Hallo, Abbot John! is that you?" shouted one of the boys, and

the other cried, "Yes, I'm taking a walk," so quickly that the one

sentence seemed the answer to the other, and both came back loud and

distinct on the still night-air.

"Are the Ormistons ancient? It's all fudge," shouted John.

"Well," said Mr. Parker, "that's the most perfect echo I ever heard.

I've no doubt the holy fathers of the Middle Ages knew of it, and used

it in some shape to keep the superstitious people in awe."

"It is awesome," said his wife, "here in the moonlight, with the old

castle so near: if I were alone, positively I should feel eerie."

"Are you dull at home, Mr. Forrester?" was sent out from the depths of

Will's chest, and sent back again just as Bessie came out and joined

the party.

"Boys! boys!" she said, "don't be foolish."

"Why, it was what you said yourself," her sister remarked.

"_Are_ you ever dull?" the lad shouted again.

"Often," answered Edwin, and "Often" came back instantly.

"In that case, Mr. Forrester," said Mrs. Parker, "why don't you get a

wife? There's no company for a young man like a good wife. Here's Miss

Ormiston; I don't think you could do better."

Think of the delicate wound of these young people being thus openly

probed in broad moonlight in the presence of so many people! What

could Mrs. Parker be thinking of? Not of her own love-passages surely,

or, if she was, they must have been of a blunter order than those of

the Rose and her lover.

"Oh no," said Bessie in cool, indifferent tones: "Mr. Forrester knows

better than that."

"There!" said Edwin, "you see, Mrs. Parker, I have been refused."

"'Faint heart never won fair lady,'" said Mrs. Parker.

The boys hallooed this sentiment to the echo, and the echo took it up

and sent it back so vigorously that even a timid man might have been

inspired. "Mary Stuart," "Henry Darnley," "James Bothwell," the lads

went on calling to the echo alternately--names which are not mere

echoes even after three hundred years, but live on by sheer force of

tragic romance. And it was possible that here, on this very spot, that

historical trio had stood and laughed and talked and amused themselves

as the young Ormistons and their visitors were doing. What words had

they used to rouse the echo? If only it could be made to give them

back now, what a wonderful echo it would be! The world would come

to listen to it. Would it tell of the passions of love and ambition,

grief and hatred, all hurrying their victims to their doom? or was the

place sacred only to gentler memories and softer moods--the scene

of enjoyment and freedom from care for however short a time? Who can

tell?

There was a woman in the village of Cockhoolet who was ninety-eight

years old, having all her faculties not perhaps quite so fresh as when

she was nineteen, but in wonderful preservation after having been in

daily use for little short of a century. She was one of a long-lived

race: her father had been eighty-nine when he died, and her

grandfather ninety-nine. Now, it is perfectly possible--and, as the

family had been on the spot for centuries, it is even probable--that

her great-grandfather might have dug the hole in which Mary planted

her tree, or he may have saddled the queen's horse when she went

hunting, or stood by the roadside and lifted his bonnet as she and her

gay train swept by. Or he may have been despatched upon royal errands

through the subterranean passage which is said to exist all the way

between Cockhoolet Castle and Edinburgh--the private telegraph of

those days, when wires in the air or under the sea by which to send

messages would have cost the inventors their lives as guilty of

witchcraft. While shaking hands with this old woman and speaking to

her, you lost sight of her and the present time and felt the air of

the sixteenth century blow in your face. Mary came up before you in

moving habit as she lived--the young Mary who caught all hearts, not

heartless herself, and laid hold of mere straws to save herself as

she drifted desperately with circumstances; not the woman who has been

painted as an actor from first to last, as coming forth draped for

effect at the very closing scene,--not that woman, but the girlish

queen who laughed and called to the echo, and forgot the cares of a

kingdom while she could.

IV.

"They are a nice family, those Ormistons," said Mr. Parker to his wife

as they drove to the railway-station in the moonlight.

"Very," said Mrs. Parker; "and Mr. Forrester is a nice lad. I hope he

and Miss Ormiston will make it out: I did my best for them."

"They'll be quite able to do the best for themselves: it is always

better to let things of that kind alone."

"I don't know that," said Mrs. Parker: "if a little shove is all that

is needed, it is a pity not to give it."

"But what if your shove sends people separate? That's not what you

intended, I fancy?"

"No fear: people are not so easily separated as all that."

"Well, we have had an uncommonly pleasant visit: I only wish the heads

of the house had been at home."

Either the attachment of this pair must have been pretty evident to

ordinary capacities, or Mrs. Parker must have been of a matchmaking

turn of mind; probably the latter, for Bessie at least was sure that

no mortal guessed her secret; which was a great comfort to her, seeing

that Edwin was so indifferent. Alas! there is no rose without a thorn,

or if there is it is a scentless, useless thing, most likely incapable

of giving either pleasure or pain.

The Parkers had left early. When the young people went in-doors again

it was only seven o'clock: the girls proposed a game at hide-and-seek,

and Bessie seconded the proposal; for you see it would have been

rather a formidable business to sit down and entertain Mr. Forrester

all the evening with conversation, rational or otherwise; and although

at the moment she was in the dignified position of lady of the castle,

she could not the less enjoy a game amazingly.

The theatre of operations was wisely restricted, because if they had

gone all over the castle they might have hidden themselves so that the

game would have been endless; therefore they kept to the under part

of the inhabited region. At length, tiring of this, they changed their

game to blindman's buff, and went to the kitchen to play it, there

being more room and fewer obstacles there; besides that, it was empty

of tenants at the time, the servants having gone to see some of the

neighbors.

It was a curious old kitchen, with a very low roof, and having a

fireplace in a big semicircular stone recess. Many a boar's head had

revolved there, and many a venison pasty had sent forth its fragrance

to greet the tired hunters returning from the chase. The fire glowed

in its deep recess like the eye of an old-world monster in a cavern,

till one of the boys seized the poker and made it flame up, throwing

its blaze out as far as it could for its walls, and making the kitchen

and the group standing in it like a picture by Rembrandt.

"Who's to be blind man first?" cried the girls.

"Edwin: that will be the best fun," the boys said.

"Very well, I sha'n't be long blind," said Edwin: "I shall soon catch

some of you. Who'll tie the handkerchief?"

"Bessie: she always ties it. Go and kneel to her, and she'll tie it so

that you won't see."

What must Mr. Forrester have felt while being blinded by the Rose?

Only, he had long been accustomed to be if not blinded, at least

dazed, by her. The boys led him into the middle of the floor and

dispersed themselves into corners. While he stood in the attitude of

listening intently, he was conscious of a very gentle movement near

him, and instantly closed his arms round it, as he thought, and

encountered empty air, while with a shout of laughter the children

cried, "Bessie was too quick for you. There, quick! quick! Edwin!" He

sprang to the corner the voices came from, and the boys rushed along

the wall to avoid his arms spread out to catch them, when suddenly the

doorbell rang.

At the sound Edwin put up his hand to take off the handkerchief, but

the boys cried, "Don't take it off: if it's any one, Bessie can speak

to them in the dining-room: we don't need to stop our game."

They were not aware that to Mr. Forrester the game without Bessie was

like _Hamlet_ with the part of Hamlet left out.

"Yes," said Bessie, "just go on, and I'll see who is at the door." As

she left the kitchen she honored Mr. Forrester with a good long look:

people can feel so much at ease looking at a blind person.

The door was chained for greater security, and Bessie did not take

off the chain: she merely opened the door as far as it would open, but

seeing no one, she opened it fully and went out on the steps; still

she saw no person, although she thought whoever rang the bell had not

had time to get out of sight. Waiting a little without result, she

went back to the kitchen.

"Who was it?" cried the children.

"No one," she said.

"But the bell rang," said John.

"Of course it did," Will corroborated.

"And somebody must have rung it," John said.

"Some one for a trick, I suppose," Bessie said, "although I don't know

how he disappeared so fast."

Without further remark the game was resumed. Edwin had caught John,

and John had caught Bessie, and when he was putting the handkerchief

round her eyes Mr. Forrester said, "You are making it far too tight,

John: you are hurting your sister."

"No fear," said John: "none of us have soft heads here. Is it too

tight, Bessie?"

"Rather, but I can bear it: go on."

"I'll slacken it first," Edwin said.

"Thank you, that will do. Now move off or I'll catch you." She went

very vigorously to work, and sent them all flying round the kitchen,

when the bell rang, and rang loudly, again.

John darted to the door and flung it wide, sure that he would see the

person who rang it, whether running away or not; but there was no

one, and the whole party followed him out, and they surveyed round and

round, but all was still and quiet and vacant, the moonlight making it

impossible that any figure should be there without being seen.

Now, if you lived in an ordinary house in an ordinary street in an

ordinary town, an incident like this would create no surprise. It

happens often: true, it is not a very new or bright joke, still it is

a joke that boys and girls enjoy, and will continue to enjoy. But away

in the country, at an old castle, with no house within a quarter of

a mile of it, the case is very different. How was it to be accounted

for?

The Ormistons came in, the girls looking scared, and the boys laughing

and saying that Mary Stuart or Darnley or Bothwell, whose names they

had made so free with shouting to the echo, must have heard themselves

called and were ringing the bell, although not allowed to show

themselves; but even as they said it the boys would fain have whistled

to keep their courage up.

"I wish papa and mamma had been at home," said Bell.

"Or if only the Parkers could have been persuaded to stay all night,"

suggested Jessie.

"Nonsense!" Bessie said. "Some one is playing us a trick, but we don't

need to let it spoil our game;" and she put the handkerchief over

her eyes. "Look here, Edwin: will you tie this? You do it better than

John."

"He doesn't," said John. "I believe he leaves it so that you can see.

I'll do it. No, I won't make it too tight."

"Don't you think, Jessie," Edwin asked, "that I could protect you, in

case of danger, as well as the Parkers?"

"I don't know. Perhaps if you were like yourself, but you're not like

yourself."

"He's as dull as ditch-water," said John.

"But," said Jessie, taking his hand with a feeling of security,

"you're better than nothing--a great deal better than nothing."

"Thank you, Jessie, thank you! A man is the better for a little

encouragement, you know;" and he looked at the Rose, but she was

blind; which made her easier looked at, to be sure, but there was less

chance of an answer, encouraging or otherwise.

They had got up the spirit of the game again, and were going on

briskly, when they were all brought to a stand by the bell ringing for

the third time.

"Don't stop," cried Bessie: "go on with the game and take no notice

unless it rings again;" and as a leader who must show no fear she

chased her sisters round the kitchen, making them flee to avoid being

caught, when, as if in answer to her remark, the bell did ring again.

This was too much. They all ran to the door, but neither human being

nor ghost was to be seen.

"I say," said John to his brother, "you and I will go out and watch.

Edwin, you'll stay with the girls--they are frightened--and if the

bell rings again we'll see who does it."

"You have more need of Edwin than we have, John," Bessie said: "it

will take you all to catch a ghost."

"Come away, then," cried John; and he posted his sentinels at

different angles, where each could have his eye on the door. The girls

shut themselves in the house, and outside and in they awaited the

result.

There was no result.

Ordinary sentinels can pace to and fro to make the moments go more

quickly, but Edwin and John and William were compelled to stand

without speech or motion, as to betray their presence would have been

to defeat their purpose. At the end of half an hour their patience was

worn out, and they came to the conclusion that whoever was playing the

trick knew that they were watching; so they went in, and hardly were

they in and the door shut when the bell rang again.

John rushed from the kitchen, whither he had gone for something, but

the others, being in the dining-room and nearer the door, reached it

before him; and again nothing was to be seen but the still calm night,

in which hung the moon with all her accustomed unimpassioned serenity.

What cared she for ghosts? Perhaps she is only a ghost herself, else

why, with all her pale quiet ways, does she never turn round and show

herself thoroughly? No doubt she has reasons of her own, whether

they are good or not: her sex is apt to be both capricious and

persistent--two qualities which she possesses in perfection.

The Ormistons and Edwin stood out on the broad walk before the door,

none of them feeling very comfortable, if the truth must be told, but

none of them showing their feelings except Bell and Jessie, who openly

declared that they were very much frightened.

"Nonsense!" said Bessie. "Who is going to be frightened at a silly

trick?"

"But it may be somebody wanting to get in to do us harm--kill us

perhaps," suggested Bell.

"People who want to get into a house for bad ends don't ring the front

doorbell, or any bell," said Bessie.

At this junction two figures appeared in the distance advancing along

the road to the castle--soon made out to be the servants, so that they

at least were guiltless in the affair.

"It has not been them, you see," cried John.

"No," Bessie said, "and you are not to say anything about it to them

when they come: if they know anything of it, it will soon leak out;

and if they don't tell, they will be quite frightened: they are as

easily frightened as Bell or Jessie here."

V.

All this time Mr. Forrester was feeling--not frightened certainly,

but--perplexed; and while he could not but admire Miss Ormiston's

coolness and courage, he could not help wishing that she had been just

a little bit chicken-hearted: it would have been so delightful to have

to act as protector and supporter. But there was no opening whatever

for such a position: she took the mysterious affair into her own hands

and pooh-poohed it entirely.

They were accustomed to early hours at Cockhoolet, but when the time

came for going to bed the girls declared they were too frightened to

go up stairs alone. "It would be far better," they both said, "for us

to stay here all together in this room till morning: we could sit up

quite well."

"Absurd!" said Bessie.

"Well, we could not sleep even if we were in bed," they protested.

"No fear," said the châtelaine. "If you were to sit up all night you

would be like ghosts yourselves to-morrow morning. Come, I'll go with

you and sit beside you till you sleep. But wait a minute till I come

back."

When they were bidding Mr. Forrester good-night he said to the girls,

"If anything happens let me know."

"Nothing will happen," said Bessie: "the bell is quiet now and the

servants are sound asleep. I have just been looking at them, and the

sooner we follow their example the better."

"What are we to do if we hear the bell ring again?" John asked.

"Nothing. Keep below the blankets, John," his sister said. "It will

ring a loud peal indeed if you hear it: I think a cannon might be

fired at your ear without disturbing you."

"That's a mistake," said John, "I am a remarkably light sleeper: a fly

on my nose will make me turn round any time."

"I believe that, but it won't waken you. Good-night;" and she took

a hand of each of her sisters and went off with all the dignity

beseeming her position as head of the family and governor of the

castle. Her presence being withdrawn, Edwin felt much as you do on a

March day when the sun goes under a cloud, although he had not

enjoyed the sun either, owing to the undercurrent of east wind that

continually chilled him. He almost determined to give it up. Of what

use was it? Evidently she did not care for him, and the words, "Mr.

Forrester here again! he must surely be dull at home," sounded in

his ears. Very east-windy they were; still, he loved her with a great

love, and he could not give her up: he was in a mist, and could see

neither to go back nor forward.

"I say, Edwin," said John confidentially, "what do you think about

this bell business? Of course one couldn't speak of it before the

girls, they are frightened enough already--Bessie too, although she

pretends not. What's your own private opinion about it?"

"Oh, it must be a ghost," said Edwin: "they do things of that kind,

you know--turn tables and rap and so on. I've been thinking I must be

an unconscious medium."

"Well," said John, "I, for one, don't believe in that kind of thing:

if the spirits ever told anything worth hearing, or did anything worth

doing, it might be different; but would Darnley or Bothwell or the

abbot, or even any of the smaller fry of monks, come back here to ring

a bell? I know in their place it's what I wouldn't do myself."

"It would depend on where they are and how employed," said Edwin:

"like some other people, they may be dull at home."

"Ah, that's what Bessie said that's sticking in your throat. Man, it's

no use minding what girls say: I never do.

"The spirits must be deplorably dull if ringing a bell is a diversion

to them."

"They may enjoy mystifying us," said Edwin. "Who knows but they are

listening just now, and laughing in whatever they may have instead of

sleeves?"

"I'm not frightened," said Will, "but I don't like subjects of this

kind at bedtime, so I wish you wouldn't say any more about it."

"It seems, however, that the bell was rung by invisible agency," said

John.

"Come, come, we'll stop talking and go to bed," Edwin said.

"But, Edwin," said Will with big eyes, out of which he could not keep

a frightened look, "do you think a spirit did it?"

"No: it is a trick, and you'll find out who did it before long."

"Well," said John, "it was a stupid trick, but cleverly done--very

cleverly done, or whoever did it would not have escaped me."

"I should not like to sleep alone to-night," Will said to his brother

in confidence when they were in their own room, "and I don't believe

you would either, although you don't say so. I wonder if Edwin likes

it, away from every one too, in that room with the hole in its roof? I

wonder papa does not get that hole mended?"

"He has often spoken about it," said John, "but if I slept in that

room I should rather like the hole. It's uncommon: every room hasn't a

hole in its roof. If you couldn't sleep, for instance, you'd have only

to stare at the hole, and you would doze off before you knew."

"Staring at it would only keep me from sleeping," Will said: "I should

always think something was looking at me through it."

"What could look at you but light--moonlight or daylight from the room

above? In the dark you would the hole."

"Let's sleep," said Will; and, forgetting ghosts and bells and all

influences, the two boys were soon asleep.

It is to be hoped the girls were asleep also; indeed, there is little

doubt the younger ones were. But Bessie, with the cares of a castle

on her head, the mysteries of the evening to perplex her, and an

unfortunate love-affair going more and more awry, how was it with her?

And Edwin, in his remote room with its hole in the roof, how did he

fare? He had gone up a stone staircase, through a long passage and

down a short flight of steps, into a room large, somewhat low in

ceiling, and, with the exception of the hole, most comfortably

appointed. It felt warm, rather too warm, and he did not replenish

the fire, preferring to let it go out. The room and the way to it

were both very familiar to him, and, like John, he enjoyed the hole:

staring at it made you sleep, and when not sleeping your fancy could

play round it to any extent. On this night the light of the moon,

shining in at the shutterless windows of the empty room above, fell

across its floor, and gleamed down through the opening.

A superstitious person with a talent for being eerie would have had

nice scope for being frightened out of his senses in a situation

like this--alone in a distant room of an old castle where bells rang

mysteriously, and with borrowed moonlight peering down from above

like a ghost looking for ghosts. But Mr. Forrester was not

superstitious--not in the least. He feared nothing material or

immaterial except--and it was a curious exception--except Bessie

Ormiston; yet it is true he loved her, perfectly as he thought, but

there was a flaw somewhere: it was not the perfect love that casteth

out fear. The turning of a straw, however, might make it that, but

who was to turn the straw? He feared to do it, and she would not.

Notwithstanding these perturbed and cantankerous circumstances, these

two people, being young and naturally sleepy, slept.

How long he had been sleeping Edwin did not know, when he awoke

suddenly, as if he had been startled by some noise. However, he might

have been dreaming: he did not know. The fire was thoroughly out

and black, there was no ray of light from the roof, and the

window-curtains being closely drawn, if there was any light outside it

was effectually shut out: the room was as dark as midnight.

He rose, and finding his way to the table groped for a box of matches

that he had noticed lying there, and lighted his lamp, when, looking

at his watch, he found the hour to be half-past three. Before going to

bed again he thought he would see what night it was. Accordingly,

he opened the curtains and shutters and gazed forth. The moon had

disappeared--which was not remarkable, as it was past her hour for

retiring--and the night was very dark and hazy. But a remarkable

object met his eye. But from an angle of the house, and toward the

corner of the field which had been the site of the ancient monastery,

there stood a column five or six feet in height of what through

the haze appeared luminous vapor. It seemed such an altogether

unaccountable thing, standing there, that Edwin pushed the window open

and rubbed his eyes to get a better sight of it. He expected it would

disappear in some way almost immediately, but it did not: there it

stood, perfectly still and perfectly distinct, at the corner of the

field, where there was absolutely nothing to cause it. He watched it

for a considerable time, and as his eye got accustomed to peering into

the darkness, he could see there was nothing near it, and not a sound

disturbed the stillness of the night.

"That's not a trick," he thought: "no one would think it worth while

to play a trick, certain of being without an audience either to see or

hear it. I question even if it is the abbot himself; or if he likes to

air himself there in the middle of a winter night, he must be too hot

at home, if not too dull."

A filmy mantle of pale white vapor is surely a more likely garment for

a spirit to snatch up and wrap round him when about to indulge in an

earthly tour than the conventional and traditionary white sheet:

in point of fact, for the sheet he must wait till he arrives in our

world, and when he does arrive he must of necessity help himself to

it; which I, for one, should be sorry to think any well-conditioned

ghost would do; but light, pale shadowy light, lying about everywhere

for the picking up, what so suitable as raiment for a being who has

nothing to wear?

It could not but occur to Edwin, Had the abbot come back to his old

haunt on some errand? Had he a benevolent ghostly interest in its

present inhabitants? Here was a work in which even a spirit of mark

might engage without loss of dignity and with perfect propriety. He

might turn tables on the perverse circumstances that kept two young

people separate; and if marriages are made in heaven, an angel need

not despise such a mission as making two lovers happy.

"Well" thought Edwin, "if you are Abbot John, how do you like to see

the dear old stones of your monastery built into dykes? or would you

have preferred seeing them applied to villa purposes?" If it were

the abbot, Edwin felt he would like to have that familiar kind of

intercourse with him which in our country is known as twa-handed

crack; and if it were not the abbot, he had a wonderful curiosity to

know what it was--to have it accounted for. There it stood, apparently

as firm and sure as the first moment he had seen it; and a cause it

must have.

Accordingly, he dressed himself with the intention of proceeding to

the spot to interview the abbot and see what kind of stuff he was made

of. Mr. Forrester took the lamp in his hand and opened the room-door

softly: not that he thought any one would hear him, but soft sounds

best become the stillness of the night. As he went down the stairs he

became conscious of a cold air playing about, as if from an open door

or window. He set his lamp on the stone sill of the passage-window,

and had his hand on the key of the outer door to unlock it, when he

heard a quick, sudden scream, apparently from the oldest part of

the building. He listened intently for a second, but there was no

repetition of it, and everything was perfectly quiet.

"That was human," he said to himself; and seizing his lamp he ran

along till he came to the door of the ancient keep, which was standing

open: he took the way he and the rest of the party had gone the

previous afternoon, and found the doors that were usually kept locked

all open. Going on very hurriedly, he came to the room where the bare

rafters were the only flooring, and at the other end of it he saw

something like a white heap gleaming. He strode across instantly, and

stooping with the light in hand discovered Bessie Ormiston lying in a

dead faint just at the edge of one of the rafters: the least movement

would have sent her down on the hard pavement below. He did not stop

to think how she came to be there: setting his lamp where it would

light him across the dangerous flooring, he lifted her up and threaded

the passages and stairs in the darkness till he laid her safe on the

dining-room sofa, still unconscious.

Kneeling beside her in the darkness, he felt that her face and hands

were very cold. He did not know what to do. If she had been any other

person, he would have had his senses about him, but, being who she

was, they had scattered themselves, and he felt dazed. The fire was

not quite out, and he thought of smashing up a chair to make it burn,

but searching in the coal-scuttle at the side, of the fireplace, he

found both sticks and coals, and heaped them on: then he lighted the

lamp that was still standing on the table. All this was the work of

a minute or two. A fainting-fit was quite beyond the range of his

experience, but he had some vague idea that in cases of the kind water

should be dashed in the face or a smelling-bottle held to the nostrils

or brandy poured down the throat; but none of these things were at

hand, and as he looked at Bessie, hesitating what to do, he saw the

color steal back to her face, and she opened her eyes and suddenly

shut them. When she opened them again she took his presence as a

matter of course, and said, "I sometimes walk in my sleep, I know, but

I am not in the habit of fainting;" and she smiled, looking much more

like the lily than the rose.

"I hope not," he said.

"It was the fright I got when I woke and saw where I was. I shouldn't

have been frightened, for I knew the place as well as I know this

room, and could have found my way back in the dark."

"What can I get for you?--you must have something." It is an awkward

thing when a nurse has to seek directions from a patient.

"Nothing," she said: "I can take nothing, and I am quite well. I can't

think how I was so foolish as to scream, and I am sorry for disturbing

you."

"You did not disturb me: if I had been asleep I should never have

heard you."

"I wish you had been asleep."

"You might have fallen through the rafters and been hurt or perished

of cold."

"I shouldn't have fallen through the rafters: I should have come to

myself and have walked back quite well alone; but I am not the less

obliged to you."

"I should say not," he said with a curl of sarcasm. "Then is there

nothing I can do for you?"

"Nothing, unless, indeed, you could get hot water for me to wash my

feet in. Sleeping as I was, I had the good sense to put on a thick

shawl, but I made my excursion barefoot: they say walking barefoot

improves one's carriage."

"Bessie, I never know what to make of you."

"If you know what to make of yourself it's a great matter: sometimes

people don't know that," she said, rather wearily.

"I had better make myself scarce at present, probably?" he said.

"I think so."

"Then good-night. You won't faint again?"

"No: good-night."

He left the room and shut the door gently, but when a few paces away

some impulse moved him to go back: she might faint again, and he would

ask if he should send one of the servants to her.

When he opened the door she was sitting with her face hidden in her

hands. At the sound of the door opening she glanced up, and Edwin saw

tears.

She turned away instantly. He went up to her and said, "I did not mean

to intrude. I forgot to ask if I should tell one of the servants to

come."

"No, you needn't."

"Bessie," he said, "you are not well, and something is vexing you.

Could you not tell me about it. I mean nothing but kindness."

"I know you don't," she said almost fiercely, "and I hate kindness:

it's an insult."

He stood in blank astonishment, "An insult?" he said.

"Yes, an insult; and if you were not obtuse you would see it. But you

don't see and you don't feel, or you would never have tried to make

any one care for you for whom you did not care a bit. But I won't care

for you, and I don't."

Off her guard, she had been stung into this. She was standing away

from him, her head erect and her eyes gleaming through tears: Mary

Stuart herself could not have been more effective.

"Care for you! not care for you!" he said in a voice he could hardly

control. "I have cared for you as I never cared for a thing on earth:

I have loved and shall love you as I have never loved a human being."

"How am I to believe it? Why did you not say it? Why did you not say

it without making me ashamed of myself?"

"Ashamed! Oh, Bessie, I only feared to annoy you."

"Annoy!"

He gathered her to him and kissed her.

A castle all to themselves at four o'clock in the morning is a piece

of fortune that rarely falls to lovers, and they need not expect it;

but those great thick walls were no way taken by surprise: they had

not been confidants of this kind of thing off and on for four or five

hundred years to be taken by surprise now. Whether after such long

familiarity with the old story they felt it any way stale, you will

readily believe they did not say.

VI.

"I've forgotten the abbot entirely," said Edwin when he had time to

come to himself after the first draught of miraculous champagne. "I

was on my way to investigate his ghost when I heard an unaccountable

scream."

"I never screamed before, and I don't think I shall ever scream again:

I don't know how I have been so weak to-night."

"Weakness always draws out kindness," said Edwin.

"I would rather be weak than obtuse," said Bessie.

"But it is better to be only obtuse than both. I know someone who was

both."

"Well, what was I to think, and what could I do?"

"Nothing better than you did--make a declar--"

"What were you saying about the abbot's ghost?"

"I was on my way to have an interview with it when--"

"What was it like, and where did you find it?"

"It was like a column of light standing not far from the house near the

corner of the abbey-field."

"And you did not think of any explanation of the phenomenon?"

"No, I did not: it seemed more mysterious even than the ringing of the

bell."

"To obtuse people it does."

"I thought the abbot might be feeling without a home, and sympathized

with him, I assure you, very heartily."

"I can tell you what it is: the servants had to rise at three this

morning to work. It is the light shining out from the laundry-window:

I've seen it often enough."

"Well, it was a providential ghost for you and Edwin."

"[illegible]" said John when they were assembled at breakfast next

morning, looking no worse for the excitement of the previous evening,

having all slept well: if the bell had rung it had disturbed no one

at all. Mr. Forrester and Bessie had not made any one the wiser of the

well-timed appearance of the abbot's ghost which had played such an

effective part in their previous night's drama,--"I say," he

said looking at Mr. Forrester and then at Bessie, "there is some

understanding between you two; you are always looking at each other,

and when you entered the room this morning you [illegible], and

started off [illegible] been caught. But I have [illegible] this

time."

Bessie realized that her secret had become common property, and

blushed becomingly.

Mr. Forrester said, "What have you suspected, John?"

"That Bessie and you laid your heads together to make the bell ring

last night to frighten us. Remember, I'm not stupid altogether."

"I assure you, John, I had nothing to do with the ringing of the

bell," Bessie said.

"Nor had I," said Edwin.

"That's queer, then," said John; "but I'm sure there's something of

some kind between you two: you're planning something, I know. What is

it?"

"Wise people don't reveal their plans to every one till near the time

for executing them, John," said Edwin.

"Oh, very well," John answered: "you can keep them to yourselves.

I dare say it's nothing of consequence;" and having finished his

breakfast, John was off to his out-door business. The shortest cut

to his destination--and he always took short cuts--was through the

kitchen, and as he hastily brushed along the wall toward the door he

was brought up suddenly by a loud peal of the bell, and he looked at

one of the servants, who was working at the table, as much as to say,

"Do you hear that?"

She answered his look: "Yes, I ha'en, but there's naebody at the door.

It was yu that rang the bell: ye cam against that bag of worsted

clues for durning that I hung on the bell-wine yesterday. When onybody

happens to touch it the weight o' 't gars the bell ring; I would hae

to ta'en off."

With this simple and inglorious explanation John rushed to the

dining-room where he found Mrs. Forrester and the châtelaine in deep

Conspiracy again; and to this hour the ghost of Cockhoolet is a matter

(if you can use that word in connection with a ghost at all) of faith

and not of sight.

When Mrs. and Mrs Ormiston returned they found that their eldest

daughter was engaged to be married, which surprised them as little as

it did the old woman but moved them a good deal more.

THE LEADEN ARROW.

A wondrous half-century was that which forms an isthmus rather than a

bridge between the Middle Ages and the times termed Modern. Exit

the Last of the Barons--enter the printing-press. Exit Boabdil

el Chico--enter Columbus and Da Gama. The plot thickened as the

_cinquecenti_ hove in view. The last years were the most pregnant.

While the last sigh of the Moor was dying into the murmurs of the

Xenil, that solitary shout that will ring while earth lasts went up

from the bows of the Pinta. Together came America and the sea-way to

India and--the rifle. For in 1498, when Buonarotti was at his prime,

Raphael, fifteen years old, had just taken his seat at the paternal

easel, and the scenes of the _Lusiad_ were in progress, "barrels were

first grooved at Venice."

Who grooved them we are not told. The name of that artist has not

survived, though we still remember his contemporary townsman, Titian.

Strictly, he is not entitled to the immortality of an originator. That

belongs to the unknown savage who, in the miocene era probably, first

gave a twist to the feather of his arrow, thereby communicating to it

a revolving motion at right angles to the line of flight, and making

it an "arm of precision." But pre-historic artillery we may dismiss

or leave to Milton. The blind bard omits to inform us whether the

guns used in the great pounding-match between Lucifer and Michael

were smooth-bores or rifles. The strong presumption is that they were

exclusively the former, and that a well-served battery of Parrotts

would have silenced them in fifteen minutes. By giving him a few

pieces of the kind the poet would have further brightened the feather

he sets in Satan's cap as the benefactor of mankind by inventing

gunpowder and shortening wars. The bow he presents to us as an old and

familiar weapon even at the date of that first and greatest of

pitched battles. Its claim, as the parent of projectile implements,

is recognized in the common etymology of _arcus, arcualia_--artillery.

Arblast, arquebuse, blunderbuss, mark a humbler collateral descent

in the same verbal family. The ballista, or fifty-man-power bow,

constituted the heavy, and the individual article the light, artillery

of twenty centuries ago. Slings and javelins, being for hand-to-hand

fighting (David was near enough to hold an easy conversation with

Goliath before bringing him down), can hardly be brought within

the designation. The twang of either heavy or light was but a thin

contribution to the orchestra of battle compared to "the diapason of

the cannonade." How much we have lost in the absence of this element

of tremendous noise from the conflicts of ancient days! What a tool

it would have been in Homer's hands! How trivial, to the author of

the book of Job, would have seemed the noise of the captains and

the shouting! We cannot, indeed, quite suppress the fancy that some

mightier counter-concussion must have filled the air at Thrasimene,

when "an earthquake reeled unheededly away:" _Nemo pugnantium

senserit_, avers Livy. But nothing is said of it. The old heroes died

in silence, like the wolf "biting hard among the dying dogs."

A well-known essay of a modern poet beautifully uses this piece of the

modern machinery of his craft. Dryden here makes distance mellow the

thunder of a naval fight into a musical undertone. The great sea-fight

between the duke of York and the Dutch, fought within hearing of

London, left "the town almost empty" of its anxious citizens, whose

"dreadful suspense would not allow them to rest at home," but drew

them into the eastern fields and suburbs, "all seeking the noise

in the depth of silence." Dryden and three friends took a barge and

descended the river. Once clear of the crowded port above Greenwich,

"they ordered the watermen to let fall their oars more gently; and

then, every one favoring his own curiosity with a strict silence, it

was not long ere they perceived the air to break about them like the

noise of distant thunder or of swallows in a chimney; those little

undulations of sound, though almost vanishing before they reached

them, yet still seeming to retain somewhat of their first horror which

they had between the fleets. After they had attentively listened till

such time as the sound by little and little went from them, Eugenius,

lifting up his head and taking notice of it, was the first who

congratulated to the rest that happy omen of our nation's victory."

This, the eloquent eolian music of distant and unseen battle, was

unheard by the ancient cities and their chroniclers and poets. It will

grow again less familiar as rifled ordnance is introduced, with its

thinner and sharper style of expression. Waterloo appears to have been

heard farther than Sedan or Metz, although its pieces were but popguns

compared with those that spoke the requiem of the Third Napoleon.

And perhaps, if we allow for smallness in number and calibre, those

employed by Robert the Bruce at the battle of Werewater in 1327--said

to be the first recorded occasion in Europe--were more vociferous than

their successors of to-day. Few and cumbrous they must indeed have

been, since Edward III. could only bring four into the field at Crécy;

and they did far less service than the twanging cloth-yard shaft in

deciding the event of that conflict.

It was not till centuries later that the rifle perceptibly exerted

its treble voice in the multitudinous debates of the _ultima ratio_.

Shrill as John Randolph's, its pipe, once set up, was very attentively

and respectfully listened to. Like his, it spoke from the woods

of America. "Stand your ground, my brave fellows," shouted Colonel

Washington under the sycamores of the Monongahela on the 9th of

July, 1755, "and draw your sights for the honor of old Virginia!"

The colonial rifle covered the retreat of the British queen's-arm, if

retreat such a rout as Braddock's could be called.

It is about the same time that we find a British writer, who had

witnessed the efficiency of the rifle as a companion implement to

the axe in pushing European settlement on this continent, saying,

"Whatever state shall thoroughly comprehend the nature and advantages

of rifle-pieces, and, having facilitated and completed their

construction, shall introduce into its armies their general use, with

a dexterity in the management of them, will by this means acquire a

superiority which will almost equal anything that has been done at

any time by the particular excellence of any one kind of firearms,

and will perhaps fall but little short of the wonderful effects which

histories relate to have been formerly produced by the first inventors

of firearms."

This was written in 1748, at which time the rifle was used only by

the hunters of the Alps and the hunters of the American backwoods;

the latter having doubtless derived it from the former through German

immigration. Bull's conservatism, however, was in the way. The lessons

of Fort Duquesne, of Saratoga and of New Orleans were successively

wasted on him. He did arm one regiment, the Ninety-fifth, with this

weapon toward the close of the last century, but for a long time it

stood alone in the royal service. Austria had previously maintained

some corps of Tyrolese Jägers. The French fought through all the wars

of their Revolution without having recourse to the rifle, save in the

campaign of 1793. It is singular that the keen eye of Napoleon failed

to detect its value, especially when we note the use he made of light

troops. The fate of Nelson justifies the idea that a large body of

good riflemen might have changed the issue of Trafalgar.

Curiously enough, the French, who were the last to realize the merits

of the rifle, were the first to institute those improvements which

caused, within the present generation, its universal substitution

for the musket. The Gallic pioneer was Delvigne, but his first

improvements proved, as Pat might say, no improvement at all. The

inconvenience of slow loading was the most obvious. Delvigne's remedy

was to give the ball increased windage; in other words, to diminish

its diameter comparatively with that of the bore. The ball thus went

easily down to the shoulders of the chamber containing the charge.

Arrived there, a smart rap with the ramrod moulded it to the grooves.

But it also flattened the top, and forced the bottom partly into the

chamber. Thus misshapen at birth, the bullet was cast upon the world

to an erratic and fruitless career.

In 1828 a second Frenchman took the tube in hand. Colonel Thouvenin

abandoned the chamber, and filled up much of the place it had occupied

with a cylindrical steel pillar, or _tige_, which projected from the

breech-plug longitudinally into the barrel. This formed a little anvil

whereon the bullet was to be beaten into the grooves. But the bottom

was flattened, and the powder acted only on the periphery of the ball

instead of the centre, tending thus to give it an oblique direction.

Here Delvigne picked up the weapon for another trial. He accomplished

far the most important advance yet seen--an advance relatively as

great as Watt's separate condenser in the steam-engine. He retained

the _tige_, but he _changed the spherical ball into a cylinder with a

conical point_, as we now have it. In this he, in effect, reached the

ultimatum of progress as regards the general form of the projectile.

He assimilated it to Newton's solid of least resistance. That primeval

missile, the arrow, had for unnumbered centuries presented to the

eyes of men an illustration of a simple truth which scientific formula

succeeded, scarce a couple of centuries since, in evolving. "The

bridge was built," as the old sapper told his commander, "before them

picters" (the engineer's designs) "came." The arrow-head describes, as

it whirls through the air, a solid varying from a cone only so far as

its edges vary from straight lines. This variation serves to blend the

cone with the cylinder formed by the revolution of the arrow-head and

the feather. The difference in length between the ball and the arrow

is due to the necessities of the case. The least practicable length

is best for both. The office of the spirally-wound feather in

communicating a rotary motion, and thereby balancing, by an opposite

force, the tendency of the missile to swerve in any given direction,

is fulfilled by the spiral groove of the rifle. Of course, the

ordinary smooth musket is unfitted to the conico-cylindrical ball.

Discharged from such a barrel, there being nothing to keep the point

in the direction of its flight, it soon tumbles over, like an arrow

without a feather, and strikes wide of the mark.

Delvigne's new gun came into use in 1840. The long matchlocks of the

Arabs had been very worrying to the French in Algiers. It was a common

pastime of the Ishmaelites to pick off the Gauls at a distance which

left Brown Bess helpless. Protruded over an almost inaccessible crag,

the former primitive instrument would plump its ball into the ranks

of the Giaour in the dell below with a precision and an effect hardly

requited by victories in the open field or by the cave-smokings of

His Grace of Malakoff. Delvigne's arm was accordingly supplied to the

Chasseurs d'Orléans, and in their hands served the desired purpose.

The matchlock met its match.

Under M. Delvigne's system, however, the ball was not always well

forced into the grooves. The _tige_, too, made cleaning difficult:

it often got crooked, and it sometimes broke off. A M. Tamisier

did something toward removing the former difficulty by cutting

very shallow grooves on the ball itself. The other called forth the

ingenuity of the now famous Minié, who made his first appearance

in 1847-1848, and whose name has attained the same kind of lethal

immortality with the names of Shrapnell, Congreve and Rodman. M. Minié

abandoned the _tige_ entirely. He scooped out the base of the ball and

inserted into it an iron cup. This cup was driven into the ball by

the explosion, and forced the soft lead into the grooves. The leading

objection to the Minié ball in this form was that the device did its

work too thoroughly. The iron was often driven so deep into the lead

as to tear off the solid point and scatter the whole projectile into

two or three pieces. This mitrailleuse-like distribution of disrupted

spheres or leaden asteroids was obviated by the abandonment of the

iron cup, the powder being left to act on the lead itself. Two or

three channels cut around the neck of the bullet helped to keep

the point in line, and aided at the same time the fastening of the

cartridge. Thus came its final metamorphosis to the buzzing little

torment that has been at intervals for the last twenty years flying

over all the continents and perplexing the nations.

It was not till 1852 that the Enfield rifle was settled on as the

standard weapon of the British army. Machinery and machinists were

imported for its fabrication from the United States, the appliances

of our government armories being copied, and Colonel Bruton, of the

Harper's Ferry Works, employed to set them going. Prior to that time

all firearms of public or private manufacture, in England, had been

made by hand, the interchangeability of all the parts of any given

number of guns being an end accomplished in this country alone. The

advantage of having every corresponding detail of each piece a fac

simile of the same part in all the firelocks of an army must have been

perceived from the time when such weapons were first invented;

and nothing but the most inveterate conservatism, or the steadiest

opposition of that stamp which mobbed threshing-machines and the

spinning-jenny, could have so long staved off its practical adoption.

Once awakened, however, England became, as she usually does, active,

innovating and experimental enough. Rifled cannon, breech-loaders and

armored ships--all the legitimate offspring of the Venetian barrel

and its American employment--have kept her ever since in a ferment of

boards, commissions and target-firing. But these would carry us

beyond our prescribed limit into a boundless field of inquiry and

description. It would be like passing from a notice of the tubular

boiler of Stephenson's Rocket to a discussion of the vast railway

system it begot.

The Crimean war afforded the first test, on a large scale, in

civilized warfare, of the issue between smooth and twist. How the

conoidal bullet and rifled barrel, opposed at Inkermann to the

antiquated Russian musket, tore through the dense columns which

had forced their way to the brow of the plateau, driving the stolid

Muscovites, "incapable of panic," back into the ravine pell-mell--how,

at many periods of the siege of Sebastopol, the rifle-pits did more to

cripple the defence than did the mortars and battering-guns--we need

not recount. These pits, and the rope mantlets wherewith they obliged

the Russians to cover their embrasures, were pronounced by Captain

(since General) George B. McClellan, in his report of the United

States Military Commission, about the only marked novelties of

the siege. Of both, _mutatis mutandis_, he and his opponents made

effective use in our civil war.

Nor shall we pick our perilous way among the Sniders, Chassepots,

Zündnadelgewehre, and Zündnadelbüchsen whose various charms absorb the

military mind at this day. The debate among them is but as to the best

utilization of the old arrow-theory. The oblong projectile, that goes

singing on its winding way, is common to them all. Slipped in at the

back door or rammed home at the front, delicately stirred up by the

insinuating needle and its titbit of fulminate or bluntly ordered off

by the snappish percussion-cap, it is the same obedient and faithful

messenger, and goes on its appointed errand in much the same style.

Under the ancient régime of the musket it required the soldier's

weight in lead to kill him. Its point-blank range was about sixty

yards, but precision even at that short distance it by no means

possessed. At the battle of Fontenoy the English and French Guards,

drawn up in opposite lines, conversed with each other prior to firing,

like two groups of friends across the street. "Gentlemen of the French

Guards, fire!" was the courteous invitation of the British commander.

"The French Guards never fire first," was the reply. And not till then

did punctilio come to an end. Such a colloquy in our day would need

to be carried on with forty-horse power speaking-trumpets, or with the

thunderous articulation of that between the bellowing Alps and echoing

Jura. Even smooth-bore field-pieces, with point-blank of three hundred

and twenty yards and service range of one thousand, have to keep their

distance. It is a rare thing now for cannon to be captured by a charge

of cavalry or the bayonet. The rifle destroys _quantum suff._ of their

horses, and, their support overpowered, they remain a helpless prey.

For this default of the blustering cannon in the trying of conclusions

with its quiet little cousin, the natural remedy is to improve its

interior in the same manner. This has been done, and with marvelous

effect in some respects. But the rifled cannon, though extensively

used both on sea and land, throwing shot and shell five miles, and at

close range through iron plates a foot thick, cannot be yet styled a

perfected weapon. It may be in a very few years, thanks to the ardent

anxiety, on the part of the several peoples composing "the parliament

of man, the federation of the world," to excel each other in the

"brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art." At present it is maintained

by very good American authority that for use under some conditions,

at short or moderate range, the smooth gun of large calibre is more

effective than a rifled gun throwing a missile of the same weight.

Our monitors continue to be armed with the fifteen-inch Rodman, very

recent experiments being cited to prove its penetrating effect on iron

plates greater than that of the European rifled guns. This, of course,

at very close range.

The rifle is, in its simplest form, a more complex instrument than the

smooth-bored piece, and will always require superior intelligence to

manage it. The army which naturally possesses this requisite in the

highest degree will best handle this decisive weapon, and be, other

things equal, the strongest army. This consideration operates in favor

of our people, among whom the rifle has always been in so much more

constant and familiar use than with those of other countries. Our

broad forests will have to be cleared and our mountain-chains,

east and west, more densely settled than Switzerland, before the

distinction of a nation of marksmen can be lost to us. So far, there

is little evidence of this change. The deer and the wild-turkey are

nearly as abundant on the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies as they

ever were. Probably there are more of both in Virginia than at the

time of the settlement of Jamestown. Like the quail and the bee, they

are favored by a certain advance of population and cultivation.

Another species of aborigine does not similarly thrive in the path of

the rifle. The Indian of the Plains is still troublesome occasionally,

but far less so than when blue-coats and blunderbusses joined forces

against him. The odds then were often on his side, for many of the red

men were armed with the rifle, while the troops had but the musket and

carbine. The appearance of the breech-loading rifle in the hands of

the United States dragoons on the frontier just fifteen years ago let

in new light upon the Camanche and Apache mind. Up to that period the

badgering of a detachment of "heavies" was a favorite pastime with

these gentry. They got up their "spring fights" with as much coolness

and regularity as the early patriarchs of Texas are related to have

done, and not merely, as in the case of the latter, in utter contempt,

but directly at the expense, of the constituted authorities. Tying

a bag of dried mule-meat and pounded corn to the peak of his saddle,

fashioning a small supply of arrows, or balls if he boasted the

spectre of a gun, coloring the inferior half of his frontispiece a

rich vermilion and the upper a delicate green, with ramifications of

lampblack coursing tastefully along the cheek-bones and the bridge of

the nose, twisting a crane's feather into the tail of his horse, and

giving his affectionate squaw a farewell kick, the cavalier of the

prairie was ready for a raid on the Long-knives. Making a rapid

night-march or two, he would carry the "latest intelligence from

the Indian country" to the border ranches of Texas or New Mexico.

Stampeding all the horses and mules that stood or ranged convenient,

and under favorable circumstances some cattle and sheep, and

"gobbling" on occasion some incautious Cyrion or Phyllis of the

Western Arcadia, the marauder made for the mountains. By the time he

had well passed the last outpost the hue-and-cry was at his heels,

followed, after an easy-going delay, by the lumbering dragoon. The

soldier, armed with ineffectual sabre and carbine, encumbered with

a variety of traps about as useful as they, usually managed, if not

forced to put back by stress of provisions, to come up with him in the

gates of the hills. There an idle interchange of arrow and round ball

between hollow and cliff wound up the eventful history of the chase.

As a rule, no marked chastisement was inflicted on the Indian: he

realized in peace the proceeds of his little speculation.

Now, Minié, like the Harpagon of his countryman, has "changed all

that." The retreating heathen flies to his hills in vain. They do not

cover him, but the rifle does. Cantering to the summit of a knoll,

he waves his compliments to the distant dragoon with a gesture of

derision, more expressive than elegant, he has acquired from the

white. Turning calmly to depart, as he sinks below the crest of the

hill a sagittiform bullet, fired at five hundred yards' distance with

all the science and talent purchasable with thirteen dollars a month

and rations, plumps into the rump of his unhappy pony, and the Stoic

of the woods is unhorsed. Reared on horseback, and weak in the legs

from long addiction to that mode of locomotion, this is a _casus

omissus_ in Lo's tactics. Scant time, however, has he for reflection.

He gathers up himself and his drapery as well as circumstances will

allow, and scuttles hurriedly off, a fluttering chaos of rags and

feathers. It is too late. Heaven is on the side of the best artillery.

A few minutes and the Philistines are upon him. Burnside's or

Remington's last patent again lifts up its voice, and the triumph of

civilization is complete.

The prairie Indian, unlike his congener of the woods, has as yet been

but partially able to substitute gunpowder for the bow. The advantage

he has in the protection afforded him by the desolation of his

waterless _mesas_ and sage-covered hills is thus in great measure

neutralized. What, when he does possess the modern firearm, he is

capable of doing with it, the achievements of the Modocs in their

volcanic stronghold will attest. But these were few, and soon went

down. The extinction of the tribes west and south of the Rio Grande

and the Humboldt cannot be many years postponed. The red rover of that

region will disappear as a combatant in the same way, and before the

same weapon, as his brother nomad of Algeria, the earliest victim of

the conoidal bullet. The spherical ball has done its appointed part

in disposing of the aborigines east of the Mississippi, where forests

covered the land and trees generally intercepted the sight at a

hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. With the extension of Caucasian

empire to the Plains came an extension of the range of vision, which

necessitated an advance in the range of the rifle. The weapon of

Sharpe figured for the first time in the van when the woods of

Missouri were passed and the open plains of Kansas reached. There

its office was, unfortunately, the strife of white against white. The

largest possible range, the greatest possible number of shots in a

given time, were demanded in a war wherein the opposing armies were

seldom within five miles of each other, or more than one man hurt to

five hundred charges of powder burned. How the Lenni Lenape must have

opened their eyes at this reproduction of the drama of a century ago

when the whites, English and French, were fighting each other for the

possession of the Delawares' lands in Pennsylvania! The feeble remnant

of the compatriots of Logan had "moved on," under pressure of a very

urgent police, a thousand miles westward to a reservation not a great

deal larger, when portioned out, than that last reservation allotted

to all men; and the pale-faces who had hung upon his track he now saw

fighting for that.

From its warlike aspect it is pleasant to turn to the contributions

of the rifle to peaceful amusement, if not peaceful industry.

Contemptuously giving the go-by to its minutest phase in this

field--the "parlor rifle," with a target against the chimney-piece

or meandering, in feline form, along our neighbor's roof-tree--we go

forth, with Snider and sunrise, to the forest fastness. Our companions

throng, tall, bronzed, close-knit and sinewy, true children of

the four-grooved, from frosty Caucasus, the Hartz, the Alps, the

Dovrafjeld, the Grampians, the Himmalaya, the Adirondack, the

Alleghany, the Nevada. The chamois, the ibex, the red deer, the

Virginia deer, the wapiti, the gour, or the royal tiger may be the

game in hand. The tiger we are accustomed to associate exclusively

with the dank jungles of Lower India, but he climbs, each summer, the

great passes of Central Asia, "the roof of the world," and makes his

way to the frontier of Siberia, beyond 50° north.

The equipment of the mountain-rifleman is characterized by simplicity

and a strict attention to business. The nature of the ground over

which he works inexorably prescribes this. The superfluities of the

fox-hunter or the partridge-shooter with his dog-cart cannot be his.

Hatchet, pouch, knife and knapsack, with alpenstock on occasion, about

comprise his kit. He may be attended by a hound or two, but not a

pack. He wants no yelling. He hears but

the Spirit of the Mist,

And it speaks to the Spirit of the Fell.

For little hollows and little hills Scott's dogs, that

raved through the hollow pass amain,

Chiding the rocks that yelled again,

may have been highly effective when his mediæval sportsmen, who

carried no guns, could keep within a furlong of them. But in the

depths of the great mountains, with point-blank range of six hundred

yards and long pops of nearly twice that, they would be preposterous.

Fancy the Quorndon or the Pytchley on the flanks of the Matterhorn!

Chamois-hunting, the sporting specialty of the Swiss and the Tyrolese,

appears to be dying out. The hunter of our day keeps it up rather as

a tradition than as a practical pursuit. He rarely bags a "goat,"

for goats are very few to bag, and those few even more supernaturally

fleet and sure of foot and keen of nose than their less-hunted

ancestors. Still, somewhere in that upper world of lilac-white that

melts into the clouds in vast but distance-softened chasms of viscid

ice and rifts of gray gneiss, there is an object for him. In some nook

or on some crag of the square leagues of desert that swell around him

a troop of the desiderated ruminants is grazing, if grazing it can

be called where grass is none. He is very sure of that. Even from the

door of his chalet he scans the slopes in the half hope of detecting a

flock or a single goat. His father and his grandfather before him had

looked forth from the same door on the same scene, snuffed the same

"caller air," mentally shaped the same pretext for yielding to the

same spirit of adventure begotten of the peaks and by going forth

to battle with the solitude, and hunted patiently, sometimes with

success, oftener without, the progenitors of the same quarry. So he

prepares himself anew for the wild and perilous tramp. A day--two or

three days--may pass without the compassing of a shot, or even hearing

the whistle of the sentinel goat as he shrills the alarm far out of

range and leads his fellows in twenty minutes to crags the hunter

cannot reach in as many hours. Death crouches in the treacherous

snow-crust beneath or the poised avalanche above. A false step or an

inch's miscalculation of leap may make him a waif for the lämmergeier

or land him among the buried villages of the last century. He toils

on until success or starvation sends him home. In the former case he

out-generals his shy game after a series of manoeuvres to which the

deepest stratagems of our Indians are straightforwardness personified.

He gets a long shot at a distance that would make the musket or

buckshot as useless as a sabre. The certainty may be apparent that the

animal, if hit mortally, must fall some hundreds of feet, perhaps into

an inaccessible chasm. There is no help for that. Now or never! The

short rifle, assisted by a portable rest, is called on for its best.

The concentrated energy of the whole chase is thrown into the long and

carefully calculated aim. A thin spurt of white smoke jets forth; a

sharp report echoes "from peak to peak the rattling crags among;" half

a dozen chamois whisk around the next rock-buttress, and "one more

unfortunate" tumbles from the verge into vacancy. The labor of days is

rewarded. Securing the scanty venison if he can, the hunter is off for

his hillside burrow, advertising his approach by an exultant jodel of

extra nerve-splitting power.

In Great Britain the rifle, ancient or modern, like, indeed, any other

firearm, has yet to establish itself as a democratic "institution."

Her forests are not forests in our sense, and her mountain-dwellers

know little of the rifle. In the duke of Athol's seventy-mile forest,

with scarce a tree save planted larches, the stag roams by thousands,

but of course the game-laws interpose, as they did eight hundred years

ago, between him and the (biped) hind. He is still the reserved

luxury of the Norman. So with the leagues of upland where His Grace of

Sutherland has made the Highlander give place to the hart, the "lassie

wi' the lint-white locks" to the Cheviot ewe--where, in short, the

white Celt has been improved out of existence as remorselessly as the

red man in America, and that in favor not of a superior race of men,

but of _feræ naturæ_. Into these and similar districts, at stated

seasons, sundry squads of gentlemen are turned loose. They either

"pay their shot," as _Punch_ has it, in the shape of rent, or are the

guests of the noble proprietors. Their devices for circumventing the

antlered monarch of the waste are amply detailed by Scrope, Hawker,

Herbert and also by the late Edwin Landseer doing the pictorial

department with a success attributable chiefly to his management of

landscape effect, for his dogs, deer and other animals from his Æsop's

fable-like groups to his four duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square,

belong--heretic that we are to say it!--properly to still life, their

want of action and _verve_ placing them beneath comparison with the

works of either one of a score of Flemish and French painters,

from Rubens and Snyders down to Bonheur and Vernet. That his unsold

pictures have brought, since his death, something like half a million

proves nothing. Time was when the worthless canvases of West and

Morland were equally transmutable into gold.

Like other forms of British field-sports, deer-stalking is

sufficiently intricate and artificial. It is obviously the occupation

of men whose primary object is more to kill time than to kill deer.

According to print, from type and plate, the stag, a reduced edition

of the American wapiti, is, in the heart of a little kingdom of some

hundreds of souls to the square mile, as little accustomed to the

sight of man and as hard to approach as he would be on the head-waters

of the Yellowstone. If five or six hours' worming, _ventre à terre_,

up the bed of a mountain-torrent, with not even a rowan-bush to aid

concealment, succeed in bringing the sports-man within two hundred

yards of his unconscious game, it is a good day's performance. How,

the dun deer's hide once perforated, the "tail" of game-keepers,

beaters and volunteer hangers-on is gathered up, the comforting

toothfu' of usquebaugh absorbed by the toilers of the brae, the victim

"gralloched" and suspended across the inevitable gray Highland pony

that makes such a capital "first light" for the foreground, and the

line of triumphant march taken up for hunting-box, clachan or castle,

have we not been told to repletion? The tool used on these occasions

is up to the latest requirements of modern science. Whitworth and

Lancaster, thanks to their projectile's being wedged in so tight as

to cause an occasional misunderstanding it and the breech-plug as to

which was expected to move, have grown unpopular. The style and the

patentee vary every year or two or oftener, breech-loading and the

elongated bullet being the only persistent features.

Among the commonalty of Britain, within a very few years past,

rifle-clubs and matches have been brought greatly into vogue under

government encouragement. Austria, _tu infelix_ this time, having

served unwillingly as an experimental target, with the most

distinguished and gratifying success to the experimenters, at

Solferino and Sadowa, gave a new impetus to the rifle movement in

England, as France, a trifle later, did to the Battle-of-Dorking

school of prophetic literature. Thus it happens that the rifle is

taking its place gradually by the side of fat Durhams, gooseberries,

lop eared rabbits and the Derby as a popular sensation. Johnny sends

over a "team," evidently in his judgment a whole one, to "shoot the

American continent." His next deputation ought to be sent, after

vanquishing the "blarsted" Gothamites, to the recesses of the

Alleghany, and pitted there against the woodsman with his ancient

weapon carrying a round ball of seventy-five to the pound, five

feet long and decorated with tin sights, double trigger and mayhap

flint-lock. The adventurers would beat in the long run, but they would

go home not wholly unlearned. Should they stay to a turkey-shoot,

they would see in it the Occidental analogue of their own public

matches--more picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific.

Strictly, it presupposes conditions non-existent in England--a

community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of hunters with

the rifle.

This recreation, primarily belonging to localities where large game,

such as deer and wild-turkeys, is found, has spread down to the

cities, where it breaks out in a sporadic form about Christmas. But

the hills are its home--the foot-hills, notably, of the Appalachian

range, the domestic turkey not being very common higher up, nor its

wild original ("original," we insist, _pace_ the _Agricultural Report_

ornithologist, who finds an ineffaceable distinction in the fact that

the tail-ring of the one is sometimes, and that of the other never,

white!) lower down.

We mind us of an ancient town in the Valley of Virginia, settled

nearly a century and a half ago by riflemen, sheltered by them through

a stormy infancy, and still steeped in the traditions of the implement

in question. Spitted by the railway, the hub of many turnpikes, and

surrounded by a thickly-peopled country, it is yet near enough to the

mountains to receive from them each winter quite a delegation of their

inhabitants. Last year wild-turkeys were shot within the corporate

limits, a deer was chased within half a mile of them, and a fine

specimen of _Felis Canadensis_ was killed in an orchard still nearer.

Four miles west of the town the fertile limestone _carse_ swells into

the shady hills, clad largely with pine, that form the long glacis of

the Alleghanies. These hills are peopled principally by a hardy race

not unlike the German woodsmen, whose blood, indeed, a great many of

them share, as their surnames, though sadly thinned down into English

spelling and pronunciation, denote. They inherit, likewise, their

fancy for the rifle. Allied with the axe, which, like Talleyrand's

supposititious frontiersman, they have not forgotten, it supplies them

materially with sport and subsistence. Their land, where arable

at all, being unproductive as a rule, wood-chopping is their most

profitable branch of farming. A score or two of them drive into town

daily, each with his four-, three- or two-horse cargo of wood. The

pile is frequently topped off with a brace or two of ruffed grouse,

there called pheasant, or a wild-turkey, less often a deer, and

more often hares; which last multiply along the narrow intervales in

extraordinary numbers. We have seen three sledge-loads of hares--say

two thousand in all--on the street of a winter's day.

This sappy and sapid contribution to its comfort and luxury the town

often repays with a jug of whisky as an addendum to the cash receipts;

although it must not be inferred from this that the hillmen are noted

for a weakness in that direction. Generally, they are as sober as they

are hard-working, independent and honest. The few who do take kindly

to strong waters are so hardened by a life of toil and exposure

that the enemy is a lifetime in bringing them down.. One little old

hook-nosed fellow was an every-day feature of the road for fifteen or

twenty years. In that entire period he was rarely, if once, seen to go

out sober. He drove but two horses, which were apparently coeval with

himself. Long practice had taught them perfectly how to accommodate

themselves to their master's failing. The saddle-horse adapted his

movements with vigilant dexterity to the rolling and pitching aloft.

On more than one occasion the woodman was found lying in the road by

the side or under the feet of his faithful and motionless team. Poor

old Jack! thou hast "gone under," deeper than that, at last, leaving

behind thee the savor of an honest name, slightly modified by that of

corn whisky.

The Hayfield Inn, a little hostelrie on the Northern "pike," is the

scene of many a turkey-shoot. Between the hill and the road, at the

foot of a ravine that runs down at right angles, room enough has

been scooped out, partly by the rains and partly by the pick, for

the house, offices and microscopic yard decorated with hollyhocks and

larkspurs. Across the highway stands a capacious barn, with open space

for wagons, and between it and the brook beyond stretches a narrow

meadow, whence a vivid imagination has extracted the name of the

caravanserai. The open space flanking the house and road is the

rifle-course, so to speak. When occupied of a mellow October afternoon

by a party of the autochthones, in their pea-jackets of blue or

hickory homespun, it presents a gay and cheery spectacle. Festooning

fence and tree around them, the Virginia creeper, or _Ampelopsis_,

shames vermilion against the mass of pines that glooms skyward beyond.

Other tints of vegetable decay fringe the brook where it winds from

side to side of the long strip of grass, green from the autumnal rain.

Little reck the assembled marksmen of Nature's stage-decorations. One

group will be mentally weighing the turkeys, another discussing the

distance--too long or too short for the peculiar powers of this or the

other individual or his weapon. Around the rude target kneel two or

three, scoring on it each man his "centre," above or below, to the

right or left, of the true centre, to counteract the ascertained

obliquity of his eye or his gun. Here a six-foot Stoic, the Nestor

of the glen, is very formally going through the ceremony of loading.

Another is slowly, and with the precision of an astronomer, adjusting

the tin slides which protect his barrel from the glitter of the sun.

The chatter of a bevy of country maidens ripples from over the way.

The horses whinny under their square-skirted saddles, or stand "hard

by their chariots champing golden corn," like the horses of Nestor,

Agamemnon, Homer and Gladstone before Dr. Schliemann's Troy; the

yearlings in the meadow alternately gaze and graze; the guinea-fowl

now and then honors the shout over a good shot with its harsh but

well-meant rattle; the rifle speaks at measured intervals; the

prizes thin off to the remainder gobbler; and so, with the quiet

characteristic of rifle-matches, the evening draws toward the dew. The

smoke-whitened guns are carefully swabbed with tow and prepared for

their rest as tenderly as infants. Dobbin is rescued from the (fence)

stake to hie hill-ward with his master, cantering exultant or jogging

grumly according to the result of the "event;" and the metropolis of

Petticoat Gap--for such, in the vernacular and on the maps, is its

unfortunate designation--relapses into virtuous repose.

The implement employed at these rural reunions is rarely the

breech-loader, or even the short gun. It promises to hold its ground

for years yet, gradually yielding to the little modern tool. The

essential characteristics of this we have described as they exist

and will probably remain. Variations in the rifling and--where

muzzle-loading is abandoned--in the appliances of the chamber will

continue to be made, as they have heretofore been made without number

numberless. The patterns now fashionable will give place to others,

in their turn to be dropped like a last year's coat. Remington,

Winchester and the rest will retire in favor of new contrivers,

devoted, like them, to the simple task of facilitating the flight of

the leaden arrow with its grooved feather in steel or iron. With them

will rise and fall a parallel series of names on a broader and more

sonorous field--the field of heavy artillery, the ponderous Wiard

being full brother to the liliputian Sharpe. Rifled cannon certainly

present problems far more complicated than the small-arm. They can

by no means be considered, as yet, so near perfection. It is boldly

maintained by many experts, both here and in England, that the

"smashing" power at point-blank range of such smooth-bores as the

Rodman 12-inch and 15-inch is greater than that of the rifle of

the same weight. The question is so closely involved with that of

armor-plates for ships and ports, and that with buoyancy and other

naval requirements, and economy and stability on land, that a long

period must elapse ere the reaching of fixed conclusions. Within the

present generation wooden line-of-battle ships, with sails alone, have

ruled the wave. These have given place to the steam-liners that began

and closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and the

prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of

iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless,

like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of

these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or

whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries

no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" question to

be solved by Darwins yet to come. But it is tolerably safe to say that

where the best shooting is to be done it will continue to be done with

the conico-cylindrical missile, spirally revolving around the line of

flight; that is, with the arrow-rifle.

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

TWO MIRRORS.

My love but breathed upon the glass,

And, lo! upon the crystal sheen

A tender mist did straightway pass,

And raised its jealous veil between.

But quick, as when Aurora's face

Is hid behind some transient shroud,

The sun strikes through with golden grace,

And she emerges from the cloud;

So from her eyes celestial light

Shines on the mirror's cloudy plain,

And swift the envious mist takes flight,

And shows her lovely face again.

When o'er the mirror of my heart,

Wherein her image true endures,

Some misty doubt doth sudden start,

And all the sweet reflex obscures,

There beams such glow from her clear eyes

That swift the rising mists are laid;

And, fixed again, her image lies,

All lovelier for the passing shade.

F.A. HILLARD.

MALCOLM.

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF "ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD,"

"ROBERT FALCONER," ETC. CHAPTER LXIV.

THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER.

When Malcolm and Joseph set out from Duff Harbor to find the laird,

they could hardly be said to have gone in search of him: all in their

power was to seek the parts where he was occasionally seen, in the

hope of chancing upon him; and they wandered in vain about the woods

of Fife House all that week, returning disconsolate every evening to

the little inn on the banks of the Wan Water. Sunday came and

went without yielding a trace of him; and, almost in despair, they

resolved, if unsuccessful the next day, to get assistance and organize

a search for him. Monday passed like the days that had preceded it,

and they were returning dejectedly down the left bank of the Wan

Water in the gloaming, and nearing a part where it is hemmed in by

precipitous rocks and is very narrow and deep, crawling slow and black

under the lofty arch of an ancient bridge that spans it at one leap,

when suddenly they caught sight of a head peering at them over the

parapet. They dared not run for fear of terrifying him if it should be

the laird, and hurried quietly to the spot. But when they reached

the end of the bridge its round back was bare from end to end. On

the other side of the river the trees came close up, and pursuit was

hopeless in the gathering darkness.

"Laird, laird! they've ta'en awa' Phemy, an' we dinna ken whaur to

luik for her," cried the poor father aloud.

Almost the same instant, and as if he had issued from the ground, the

laird stood before them. The men started back with astonishment--soon

changed into pity, for there was light enough to see how miserable the

poor fellow looked. Neither exposure nor privation had thus weighed

upon him: he was simply dying of fear. Having greeted Joseph with

embarrassment, he kept glancing doubtfully at Malcolm, as if ready

to run on his least movement. In few words Joseph explained their

quest--with trembling voice and tears that would not be denied

enforcing the tale. Ere he had done the laird's jaw had fallen and

further speech was impossible to him. But by gestures sad and plain

enough he indicated that he knew nothing of her, and had supposed her

safe at home with her parents. In vain they tried to persuade him

to go back with them, promising every protection: for sole answer he

shook his head mournfully.

There came a sudden gust of wind among the branches. Joseph, little

used to trees and their ways with the wind, turned toward the sound,

and Malcolm unconsciously followed his movement. When they turned

again the laird had vanished, and they took their way homeward in

sadness.

What passed next with the laird can be but conjectured. It came to be

well enough known afterward where he had been hiding; and had it not

been dusk as they came down the river-bank the two men might, looking

up to the bridge from below, have had it suggested to them. For in the

half-spandrel wall between the first arch and the bank they might

have spied a small window looking down on the sullen, silent gloom,

foam-flecked with past commotion, that crept languidly away from

beneath. It belonged to a little vaulted chamber in the bridge,

devised by some vanished lord as a kind of summer-house--long

neglected, but having in it yet a mouldering table, a broken chair

or two and a rough bench. A little path led steep from the end of

the parapet down to its hidden door. It was now used only by the

game-keepers for traps and fishing-gear and odds and ends of things,

and was generally supposed to be locked up. The laird had, however,

found it open, and his refuge in it had been connived at by one of the

men, who, as they heard afterward, had given him the key and assisted

him in carrying out a plan he had devised for barricading the door.

It was from this place he had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue

Peter, and to it he had as suddenly withdrawn again--to pass in

silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.[1]

[Footnote 1:

Com' io fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro

Gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi,

Tant' era ivi lo'ncendio senza metro.

_Del Purgatorio_, xxvii. 49.]

Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she seldom had

visitors at Kirkbyres--not that she liked being alone, or indeed being

there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her

son's trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking

upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them,

kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share

in poor Stephen's misery. It was only after scraping for a whole year

that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at home.

There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro.

What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight--she had put out

her candles--it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think:

there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing

down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.

But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil

beasts: they know not what they do--an excuse which, except in regard

to the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it

must testify its falsehood.

She looked up, gave a cry and started to her feet: Stephen stood

before her, halfway between her and the door. Revealed in a flicker

of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and for

a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense. But when the coal

flashed again there was her son, regarding her out of great eyes that

looked as if they had seen death. A ghastly air hung about him, as if

he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent bearing there was

a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed her. He came forward

a pace or two, stopped, and said, "Dinna be frichtit, mem. I'm come.

Sen' the lassie hame an' du wi' me as ye like. I canna haud aff o' me.

But I think I'm deein', an' ye needna misguide me."

His voice, although it trembled a little, was clear and unimpeded,

and, though weak in its modulation, manly.

Something in the woman's heart responded. Was it motherhood or the

deeper godhead? Was it pity for the dignity housed in the crumbling

clay, or repentance for the son of her womb? Or was it that sickness

gave hope, and she could afford to be kind?

"I don't know what you mean, Stephen," she said, more gently than he

had ever heard her speak.

Was it an agony of mind or of body, or was it but a flickering of the

shadows upon his face? A moment, and he gave a half-choked shriek and

fell on the floor. His mother turned from him with disgust and rang

the bell. "Send Tom here," she said.

An elderly, hard-featured man came.

"Stephen is in one of his fits," she said.

The man looked about him: he could see no one in the room but his

mistress.

"There he is," she continued, pointing to the floor. "Take him away.

Get him up to the loft and lay him in the hay."

The man lifted his master like an unwieldy log and carried him,

convulsed, from the room.

Stephen's mother sat down again by the fire and resumed her knitting.