This is as old as - entered, he asked those who were about | in particular to all men. to become his brethren to test the scope Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and of his desires and the energy of his will Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor by employing him on the most menial country, for I know one of Scottish blood offices. He sat down and wrote to his but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still parents in the most affectionate terms, lingers about the lilied lowland waters of but expressed with the greatest firmness that shire. But the streams of Scotland his irrevocable determination, which de- are incomparable in themselves or I am cided forever his vocation, and finally fixed only the more Scottish to suppose sothe wheel of his destiny. Finding him- and their sound and color dwell forever in self in the cloister, cut off from the world the memory. How often and willingly do and from his family, he did not intend I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or that his sacrifice should be incomplete Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirlhe accepted it in its entirety, and he con- ing in its Lynn; on the bright burn of summated it as does the suicide, who, in Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours his final paroxysm and delirium, by sev- and sulks in the den behind Kingussie! ering the body from the soul takes his I think shame to leave out one of these leave of life and of its enchantments. enchantresses, but the list would grow too Thus contemplating him-as the first to long if I remembered all; only I may not begin the morning's work and the last to forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting retire to rest, enfeebled by fasting, ema- Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its polciated by penances, with his face hidden lutions, that water of Leith of the many under the dark folds of his cowl, his body and well-named mills-Bell's Mills, and mantled in a coarse serge shroud, his eyes Cannon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redbrilliant with the light of a superhuman ford Burn of pleasant memories; nor yet, inspiration, his lips incessantly moving in for all its smallness, that nameless trickle prayer, pale as death, tragic as despair, that springs in the green bosom of Allerabstracted and withdrawn from the world muir and is fed from Halkerside with a like a mystic and ideal person — you would perennial teacupful, and threads the moss have held him to be no real man, who under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes could love as mortals love who spend one pool there, overhung by a rock, where their time in useful professions and in I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is practical studies, but a pure spirit, a sort then kidnapped in its infancy by subterof supernatural and miraculous shade, ranean pipes for the service of the seaeither proceeding from earth to immortal- beholding city in the plain. From many ity, or come down from heaven to earth. points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem to the inexpert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would take it an ap preciable time to fill your morning bath; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain genius loci, I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me. EMILIO CASTELAR. From Longman's Magazine. To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places. So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of peat smoke. And the rivers of home are dear John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering, sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when the drove-roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a rough business not without danger. The drove-roads lay apart from habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic, and in the one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of which offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked by two men after his watch—and at least once, betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the inroads of pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to wrath, these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far up the hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his shoutings; and in the lambing-time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part, he was at first my enemy, and Í, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harbored this ogre; I skulked in my favorite wilderness like a Cameronian of the killing-time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing dragoons. Little by little, we dropped into civilities; his hail at sight of me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the red indian's calumet, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me a cry" over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and for me to overtake and bear him company. That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and colored; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain and a thread of latent anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking a little before me, "beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guid ing me up-hill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best talkers; only that talking Scots and talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing, at least, but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a color of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans of sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionally thinned and strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs, all these he could present so humanly, and with so much old experience and living gusto, that weariness was excluded. And in the midst, he would suddenly straighten his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the use of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and raised faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and spread themselves upon the indicated circuit. It used to fill me with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story; but John denied these creatures all of his assistants. intelligence; they were the constant butt | the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton of his passion and contempt; it was just (Caer Ketton, wise men say) there is a possible to work with the like of them, he scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam said; not more than possible. And then for washing sheep. John was one day he would expand upon the subject of the lying under a bush in the scrog, when he really good dogs that he had known and was aware of a collie on the far hillside, the one really good dog that he had him- skulking down through the deepest of the self possessed. He had been offered forty heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew pounds for it; but a good collie was worth the dog; knew him for a clever, rising more than that, more than anything to practitioner from quite a distant farm; one a herd; he did the herd's work for him. whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw "As for the like of them!" he would cry, him masterfully steering flocks to market. and scornfully indicate the scouring tails But what did the practitioner so far from home? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the pool?-for it was towards the pool that he was heading. John lay the closer under his bush; and presently saw the dog come forth upon the margin, look all about to see if he were anywhere observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears, and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike homeward over the hills. That same night, word was sent his master, and the rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence, before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for alas! he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; and it was from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton. Once I translate John's Latin, for I cannot do it justice, being born Britannis in montibus, indeed, but alas! inerudito sæculo- once in the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach to John and a slur upon the dog; and both were alive to their misfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had found a pair of sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask for restitution. But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights. "How were they marked?" he asked; and since John had bought right and left from many sellers and had no notion of the marks, "Very well," said the farmer, "then it's only right that I should keep them." "Well," said John, "it's a fact that I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, will ye let me have them?" The farmer was honest as well as hard, and besides I dare say he had little fear of the ordeal; so he had all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's dog into their midst. That hairy man of business knew his errand well; he knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their shame) lost them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the Lord knows how, unless by listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery; and without pause or blunder, singled out, first one and then another, the two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and refused; and the shepherd and his dog-what do I say? the true shepherd and his man-set off together by Fairmilehead in jocund humor, and "smiled to ither" all the way home, with the two recovered ones before them. So far, so good; but intelligence may be abused; the dog, as he is by little man's inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue; and John had another collie tale of quite a different complexion. At A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life, in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine dilettanti but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlors and shades of manner and stillborn niceties of motive, and begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death, or childbirth; and thus ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a near neighborhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi-artificial flowerets. as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the proc ess of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art, which was once the fashion of an empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past. There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best; a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries- his wife, that accomplished lady, squatting by his side; his name I never heard, but he is often described as probably arboreal, which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilized nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill. From St. James's Gazette. MY NIECE. PERHAPS the most trying evening my elder brother and I ever passed together was when his first child was born. He was then thirty-six and I was sixteen. So far as I knew, the affair was very sudden. My presence completely damped him, and I question whether he would not rather give up having children than go through that experience again. As for myself, I really felt keenly for him; though, of course, it put me in a very awkward position. We sat together in the study, he on an armchair drawn near the fire and I on the couch. I can't say now at what time I began to have an inkling that there was something wrong. It came upon me gradually and made me very uncomfortable, though of course I did not show this. I heard people going up and down stairs, but I was not at that time naturally suspicious. Comparatively early in the evening I felt that my brother had something on his mind. As a rule, when we were We have not so far to climb to come to left together, he yawned or drummed with shepherds; and it may be I had one for his fingers on the arm of his chair to show an ascendant who has largely moulded that he did not feel uncomfortable, or I me. But yet I think I owe my taste for made a pretence of being at ease by playthat hillside business rather to the art and ing with the dog or saying that the room interest of John Todd. He it was that was close. Then one of us would get up, made it live for me, as the artist can make remark that he had left his book in the dinall things live. It was through him the ing-room, and go away to look for it, taksimple strategy of massing sheep upon a ing care not to come back again till the snowy evening, with its attendant scam- other had gone. In this way we helped pering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-camp, each other. On that occasion, however, was an affair that I never wearied of see- he did not adopt any of the usual mething, and that I never weary of recalling to ods; and though I went up to my bedroom mind; the shadow of the night darkening several times and listened to hear what he on the hills, inscrutable black blots of did, he did nothing. At last some one snow shower moving here and there like told me not to go up-stairs, and I returned night already come, huddles of yellow to the study feeling that I now knew the sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the worst. He was still in the armchair, and snow, a bitter air that took you by the I again took the couch. I could see by throat, unearthly harpings of the wind the way he looked at me over his pipe along the moors; and for centre piece to all that he was wondering whether I knew these features and influences, John wind- anything. I don't think I ever liked my ing up the brae, keeping his captain's eye brother better than I did that night; and upon all sides and breaking, ever and I wanted him to understand that, whatagain, into a spasm of bellowing that ever happened, it would make no differseemed to make the evening bleaker. It ence between us. But the affair up-stairs is thus that I still see him in my mind's was too delicate to talk of, and all I could eye, perched on a hump of the declivity do was to try to keep his mind from broodnot far from Halkerside, his staff in airying on it by making him tell me things flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. about politics. The kind of man my brother is is this. He is an astonishing master of facts, and I suppose he never read a book yet, from a blue-book to a volume of verse, without catching the author in error about something. He reads books for that purpose. As a rule, I avoided argument with him, because he gratulate him, but it seemed a brutal thing was disappointed if I was right and to do. I had not made up my mind stormed if I was wrong. It was therefore when I heard him coming down. He was a dangerous thing to begin on politics, laughing and joking in what seemed to but I thought the circumstances warranted me a flippant kind of way, considering the it. To my surprise he answered me in a circumstances. When his hand touched rambling manner, and occasionally broke the door I snatched at my book and read off in the middle of a sentence and seemed as hard as I could. He was swaggering to be listening for something. I tried him a little as he entered, but the swagger on history, and mentioned 1822 as the went out of him as soon as his eye fell on date of the battle of Waterloo just to give me. I fancy he had come down to tell him his opportunity. But he let it pass. me, and now he did not know how to beAfter that there was silence. By-and-by gin. He walked up and down the room he rose from his chair, apparently to leave restlessly, looking at me as he walked the the room, and then sat down again, as if one way while I looked at him as he he had thought better of it. He did this walked the other way. At length he sat several times, always eyeing me narrowly. down again and took up his book. He Wondering how I could make it easier did not try to smoke. The silence was for him, I took up a book and pretended something terrible; nothing was to be to read it with deep attention, meaning to heard but an occasional cinder falling from show him that he could go away if he the grate. This lasted, I should say, for liked without my noticing it. At last he twenty minutes, and then he closed his jumped up, and, looking at me boldly, as book and flung it on to the table. I saw if to show that the house was his and he the game was up too, and shut "Anne could do what he liked in it, went heavily Judge, Spinster.' Then he said, "Well, from the room. As soon as he was gone William, do you know that you are an I laid down my book. I was now in a uncle?" He calls me William when he state of nervous excitement, though out means to be half-humorous. There was wardly I was quite calm. I took a look silence again, for I was still trying to at him as he went up the stairs, and no- think out some appropriate remark. After ticed that he had slipped off his shoes on a time I said, "Boy or girl? 'Girl," he the bottom stair. All self-assertiveness answered. Then I thought again, and all had left him now. at once remembered something. "Both In a little while he came back. He doing well?" I asked. "Yes," he said. found me reading. He lit his pipe and Then we lapsed into silence, and sat lookpretended to read too. I shall never for- ing at the fire. "You had better go to get that my book was "Anne Judge, Spin- bed," he said eventually, in a rather irrister," while his was a volume of Black-tated voice. I said that of course I didn't wood. Every five minutes his pipe went out, and sometimes the book lay neglected on his knee as he stared at the fire. Then he would go out for five minutes and come back again. It was getting late now, and I felt that I should like to go to my bedroom and lock myself in. That, however, would have been selfish; so we sat on and on. At last he started from his chair, as some one knocked at the door. I heard several people talking, and then loud above their voices a younger one. When I came to myself, the first thing I thought was that they would ask me to hold it. Then I thought, with another sinking at the heart, that they might want to call it after me. These, of course, were selfish reflections; but my position was a trying one. The question was, what was the proper thing for me to do? Then I remembered that my brother might come back at any moment, and all I thought of after that was what I should say to him. I had an idea that I ought to con mind sitting up if it would do any good, but he said it wouldn't, so I went. At the door, however, I stopped, and coming back with a mighty effort I shook his hand. I think he saw what I meant. I So far I never blamed him in any way, for I knew he could not help it. But he was a little inconsiderate afterwards. didn't want to go out much for a day or two, until the thing had blown over; but next morning he told me to telegraph the news to our mother. That was a delicate thing to do, and I contend that he should have done it himself. When I got to the telegraph office I walked up and down the pavement for a long time. It was a small town, and I felt sure that the clerk would know me. At last I entered, and despatched the following telegram, which seemed to me to put the affair in a chastened sort of way: "Daughter arrived safe last night. All well." The only other thing worth mentioning is the advertisement. My brother would not take it |