quaint. I have an account of them some. where, and may possibly give it to Maga's readers on another occasion. I have not left myself space for it in the present paper; but I will mention, before I forget it again, the resistance to serving the office of high sheriff which was persistently and successfully offered for many years by an eccentric old squire. He cared little for the honor and glory of the shrievalty, and objected most earnestly to the trouble and expense, for he would have had to buy a state carriage, set up a troop of retainers, and I know not what besides. On the other hand, there was a fine of, as I think, £500 for not serving the office, if once nominated to it. The problem therefore, for the old character, was to avoid serving the office, and avoid paying the fine. This he solved very effectually by giving notice to the officers who named the magnates from whom the sheriff would be selected, that if made sheriff he would serve. "But as sure as you live," he added, "I'll go with a wain and oxen to meet the judges, and my people shall come in smock-frocks, with forks in their hands." Everybody was convinced that he would do as he threatened; they did not dare to commit the honor of the county to such hands; and he went down to the grave a very old man, without having been ever troubled to execute the office of chief magistrate. And now, by a glance at the clock, I learn that I must give over my musings, and betake myself elsewhere. By the way, is it now a decreed method that we are to change the small hours of our af ternoons into teens and twenties? If so, who is to bring about the alteration, and for whose benefit is it to be done? I quite fail to perceive what gain there can be in marking the dial with XVI.'s and XXIV.'s, or in talking of twenty-one o'clock, to compensate for the wrench which our habits will suffer in renaming the afternoon and evening hours. We shall be spared the trouble of writing A.M. and P.M. when we specify the time of day, and we shall avoid the confusion which might possibly arise from omission to insert these abbreviations; in return, we shall have a cumbersome method of notation. Surely the old style has not been found so inconvenient that a new one is imperatively called for! For my part, I have run through a large number of years without ever coming to thirteen o'clock, and I could be well content to live out my span without being ever taught by proud science to stray to that numerator of time. We can see how the world wags quite as well with small numbers as with mouthfilling ones, and the tale which hangs thereby will be as impressive in units as in dozens. When it was necessary to alter the reckoning of years, those who understood the matter submitted to inconvenience with a good grace, and kept Epiphany on what would have been Christmas day, because there had been really an error in the old style. But there is no error in reckoning the twelve hours twice in the astronomical day; and all I have to say is, that well, I can't say all that is in my heart just now, for if I do I shall inevitably miss my train. - carrying cattle and sheep, herring barrels, and wire fencing, with miscellaneous trifles of the kind. As for Auchnadarroch station, which is situated at the head of Strathoran, the station-master, metaphorically as well as physically, is one of the biggest men in the north country. Dressed in a deal of brief authority, he has the satisfaction of patronizing the country-folks who travel by the trains; he is toadied in the summer by innocent Cockneys, helplessly eager for direction and advice; and he may simultaneously indulge his indolence and fussiness by managing to make an infinite ado about nothing. Save a lonely shooting-lodge or two, a couple of manses, and the resi dence of Glenconan, there is nothing in the shape of a gentleman's house within a radius of some score of miles; and although the MacTavish Arms and posting establishment stands within a short gunshot of the station, in those opening days of June it has barely taken down its | and at last it drew up at the platform. shutters. So it was all the stranger that, one bright afternoon in June, the station should be the scene of unwonted excitement. The platform, usually left to be cleansed by the rains and winds, was swept and garnished; the porter had taken his hands out of the pockets of his corduroys; the station-master was standing at attention, and in close conversation with an elderly Highlander in homespuns; while the smoke of the train was visible in the middle distance, as it came sobbing and puffing up the stiff incline. The cause of the excitement might be explained by a carriage that had pulled up on the shingle sweep before the pine-built porch of the little booking office. It was a wagonette of teak, with a pair of smart chestnut cobs - one and the other strong, low, and serviceable; while the well-set-up driver had a certain style about him that savored rather of the Parks and Piccadilly than of Ross-shire. "And as I was saying to you, Mr. Ferguson," drawled the Highlander in homespun, "this will be a great day for Glen conan." "I do not doubt it, Mr. Ross - I do not doubt it," replied the other, motioning away with an affable wave of the arm the tender of the Highlander's snuff-mull. He was excited, and could not help showing it, though he prided himself on the serenity of his deportment. "We do what we can; but man's powers are lim. ited, and we must have resident proprietors if we are to develop the local traffic." Donald Ross rumpled up his shaggy eyebrows. He was a fine specimen of the elderly hillman - as tall as the stationmaster, and far more muscular. Hardlooking and weather-beaten, he seemed to have worked away, in a long life among the hills, all superabundant flesh from his bone and sinew. Though his Saxon was serviceable, like the cobs, he was not strong in it; he failed to catch the mean ing of the station-master, and he struck back into his own line of thought. "Ay, more resident gentlemen, as you were saying, will be a great thing; and it will be a great thing for Glenconan when we have one of the Glenconans' among us again. I'm thinking he will be turning Corryvreckan and Glengoy into deer; and 'deed these shepherd-men are just one of the plagues of Egypt that the minister would be speaking about the former Sabbath-day." Meanwhile the train was approaching, Three gentlemen got out of a first-class carriage. The station-master received them cap in hand, with an obsequiousness significant of the solemnity of the occasion. As for Donald, he slightly lifted his deer stalker bonnet, and pulled shyly at a grizzled forelock; but his grey eyes gleamed with such a soft satisfaction as you may see in a friendly collie gratified by the home-coming of his master. The foremost of the three, who naturally took the lead, was a hale veteran of about sixty or somewhat more, cast very much in the manly mould of the keeper. His dress was almost as rough, though carefully put on; but there was no possibility of mistaking him for anything but a gentleman: and if his face was beaming with excitement and good-humor, he was nevertheless the sort of man you would have been sorry to quarrel with. There was energy of purpose in the features, that were high and even harsh, as in the flash of the keen grey eyes; with a touch of sarcastic resolution about the corners of the firm mouth. His companions, who kept themselves modestly in the background, were boys in comparison. One of them might have come of age a year or two before; the other was some halfdozen years his senior. The elderly gentleman acknowledged the salutation of the station-master with a nod, and a quick look that seemed to read the man through and dispose of him. But his greeting to Donald was cordiality itself as he held out the muscular hand, which the other evidently had expected. "And so you're here, are you, Mr. Ross, instead of upon Funachan; and this is the way you've been looking after the deer in my absence." Donald grinned a width of welcome like the breaking of a blaze of sunshine after a thunderstorm over the waters of the neighboring Lochconan. “And 'deed it was very little of the deer that I was thinking of to-day, Glenconan, though I might possibly have been speaking of them to the station-master here," he added conscientiously. "And it's a pity but there was your piper to give you your welcome; but Peter has been palsied since the Martinmas before last and short in the wind, moreover. And how have you been keeping, sir; and how was Miss Grace?" 46 Exceedingly well, and all the better for the thought of coming home. I can answer for myself, and I can answer for her too. As for Miss Grace, you will see her here in a few days, and then she can | the Conan, and gazed down into the depths speak for herself, which she is very well able to do. And now, Donald, lend a hand with the luggage, will you? I long to be off, and up the glen." As for the luggage, it was light enough. The heavy baggage had been forwarded a few days before. In the twinkling of an eye the wagonette was packed; the porter, exulting over a generous tip, was looking forward to a pleasant evening in the bar of the MacTavish Arms; and Donald sat perched beside the stylish coachman, watching the start of the impatient cobs. There are few finer drives in the pic turesque western Highlands than that down the broad strath of the Bran and up the romantic valley of the tributary Conan. The comparatively open character of the pastoral scenery in the former valley is a fitting approach to the more gloomy grandeur of the other. Dipping into Strathoran, after some of the more savage landscapes through which you have passed in the train, you might pronounce the country almost tame. The river meanders among gently sloping green hills, strewed here and there with stones, and crested with heather. From the level of the car riage-road you seldom catch a glimpse of the towering summits of any of the noble giants in the background; but at the "meeting of the waters," where the Conan joins the Bran, the scenery changes its character altogether. Entering the side gorge, where the shadows gather even at noon, we leave softness and light for sternness and desolation. The swift black rush of the Conan, which has been pent for a space between beetling cliffs, pitches itself in the exuberance of sudden release over a brawling and foaming waterfall. The eddies of the deep, dark pool below confound themselves with the reflected blackness of interlacing fir boughs. As for the road, it has been roughly yet shrewdly engineering along the sloping ledges of the cliffs that hang between the hills and the river. It is a safe enough ascent, for the gradients are broad though steep, but a dangerous place to drive down under any circumstances; for it is only fenced on the river-side by an occasional upright stone in the Alpine fashion, and its gravel is apt to be washed and mined by the side rills flowing across it from a succession of trickling cascades. The elder of the two young men had never visited the glen before. In silent admiration, with a rapt look in his soft hazel eyes, he hung over the side of the wagonette as it swayed slightly towards of the abyss. The elderly gentleman, who sat by him on the front seat, drew long breaths of profound satisfaction; and yet the very next moment you would have said that his face had slightly clouded. At least so it seemed to strike the youngest of the three, whose quick eyes, that caught everything above and below, were suddenly attracted by the other, and watched him curiously. Not for long, however. If he thought his host had an abiding care, that must only have been a foolish fancy; and what, indeed, could be more improbable? David Moray, the lord of those barren grandeurs of Glenconan, was at last realizing the cherished dream of his life. He was returning a rich man to the paternal property, which he had only visited at rare intervals since he inherited it; and to the shootings, which had been leased till last year to a southern banker. Now he might hope to end his days there in peace, if the dregs of life would only run kindly. He was a sportsman born; he had come back to a paradise of sport; and though his life had been passed in tropical climates, he was as hale and sound of constitution as any man of his years could hope to be. He could be a boy still in the light exuberance of his spirits; and nothing keeps a man so fresh as perennial boyhood. If he had been coming home to Glenconan, as he used to come, for the holidays, he could hardly have thrown himself more heartily into the happy excitement of the hour. As the road extricated itself from the bosky entanglements of the shaggy gorges, and swept down into a smiling stretch of mountain meadows, he stood up in the carriage, though sorely puzzled to keep his feet; for the wagonette, as it dashed downwards with locked wheels, was rocking about like a boat among the lake billows in a fresh north-easter. But it was not for nothing that Moray had so often taken the Overland route, to say nothing of weathering the Cape. And now that he was fairly and finally homeward bound, in the "kent face" of each peak and ridge he saw the features of some familiar friend of his childhood. 66 Fine weather to-morrow, Donald, though of course that old glass of yours is at 'stormy' as usual; for there is the cloud-belt on the sides of Funachan: had the hill been wearing his nightcap, it would have been another matter altogether. I say, Jack, do you see that pur ple patch on the shoulder there, away to the right of the gap, and just over the birch stump? - you should have been with me the last evening I shot there with my tenant, when we found the coveys lying like stones, though they had been wild as hawks elsewhere all through the day. Please the Fates, we'll have bloodshed there in August. And when you go out for sketches, what do you think of that for a subject? - the pool, I mean, with the grey rock, like a chapel gable rising out of the water. And if Leslie is looking for a spot where he may indulge himself in dreaming and poetry, that bank of bracken under the birches there ought to suit him down to the ground - if we dare to talk of ground, indeed, in connection with any scene so ethereal." climbers. But then the situation was simply enchanting. It stood on a gentle slope, facing towards the sunny quarter of the south-west. Before it, lawns of the richest and softest green, watered by the rain-storms and the perpetual flying showers, ran down to Lochconan. And the lake lay sparkling like a gem in its mountain setting, changing colors with the changing hues of the sky, from sapphire to emerald, and from emerald to black onyx. Around three-fourths of its broken circumference the little loch was girdled by swelling knolls - winding bays receded till they were lost to sight among oaks, and pines, and the copses of weeping birches. On the opposite shore was In the further miles of unmeasured a wall of sheer precipice, where a pair of Highland road that led on to the old house peregrine falcons had nested from time of Glenconan, the face and spirits of its immemorial, in an accessible rift far above lord and master seemed to answer to the among the rocks. When letting the changes of the weather and the scenery. shootings, there had always been an unIt was a fine day - a very fine day; but derstanding that these old friends of the there were a few fleecy and drifting clouds family were to be sacred from the gun. flitting occasionally across the heavens, But the great feature of Lochconan was and now and again some jutting angle of its heronry, on the haunted isle of St. rock would cast a streak of blackness Gilzean. The sainted missionary, who across the brightness of the road. So was said to have dipped hundreds of paMoray's face would from time to time be gan Celts in the waters of his blessed shadowed by some darker or sadder spring, had subsequently received the thought, which seemed barely to touch crown of martyrdom at the hands of his it in passing. But when the wagonette ungrateful proselytes. Since then he had pulled up before the door of the mansion, been in the habit of "walking" to a surhe was the kindly Highland host, over-prising extent - considering that his life flowing with hospitality and natural pride during his latter years had been sedenin an ancestral seat, standing on a site tary. Not a man in Glenconan or the which had been the home of his family for generations. The house of Glenconan was plain and unpretending enough, and yet its sur roundings gave it infinite charm. The feudal, or rather the patriarchal keep, had been blown up in the '45 with certain spare powder-casks that were embarrassing the march of the "red soldiers," although its foundations were still to be seen on an adjacent knoll, overgrown with the ground-ivy struggling through the thick beds of bracken. As for the modern mansion, as we said, it was neither imposing nor very commodious; although it ran to a considerable number of small bedrooms and garrets, which seemed to have been elbowed aside by the rambling passages. It was built in the modern mediæval Scottish fashion, with a couple of receding wings, connected with the main body or corps de logis by semicircular corridors. It was whitewashed, or "harled," as they say in the north; and its staring and sadly expressionless face was toned down by neither creepers nor adjoining parishes would have set foot upon the island for all the world after dusk. It may be that the silvery forms of the birds, floating ghost-like in the gloaming through the stems of the larches, had something to do with the perpetuation of the legend. And a pretty kind of poetry they added to the loch, in the presence of their silent, shadowy shapes, standing motionless but wide awake in the shallows through the day, on the lookout for unwary trout or minnows. Behind the house and the kennels the ground rose rapidly. The steep home paddocks, where the shaggy shooting. ponies ran loose, were skirted by shrub beries of evergreens, backed up by thickets of pine; and as the heather shot up through the rough herbage, so the green of the enclosures and the lower hills was studded with rich masses of purple. Roughly traced paths, softly carpeted here and there by the thick fall of the fir nee. dles, wound through the columns of the firs, or lost themselves among the birch clumps and the alder thickets. Thence they emerged on the barer steeps above, | hall as might have suited the retreat of where they zigzagged upwards from side a Lord of the Isles or a Lady of the to side across the rocky beds of a couple Lake. The trophies of the chase that of mountain brooks-streamlets or tor- profusely adorned the vestibule had overrents according to the weather. And each flowed into the dining-room. The walls of the light rustic bridges each tiny bit were adorned with noble stags' heads, inof jutting cliff projecting through the trail- terspersed with those of roe-deer and ing and gnarled fir roots - seemed to open grinning wildcats. To each was attached some new and enchanting point of view a brief obituary notice, and the inscripup to the cloudland that capped the con- tions dated back for a couple of genera fusion of mountains. tions and more. Even tenants of the Glenconan shootings had taken a pride in leaving some of the choicest of their spoils near the scenes where they had won them - the more so that each of the sportsmen left his name as well as a memory behind him. The golden eagle was setting in aerial dance to the osprey, which spread her wings in act to soar above the sideboard; and beneath these, a grizzled badger was snarling at an otter about to take a header off a moss-grown ledge. There were trout and salmon rods, and racks for guns and rifles in the corners, and a fair show of somewhat grim family portraits to boot. So far, the decorations, though you certainly could not call them commonplace, were what might have been seen in any Highland gentleman's halls. But then, by way of contrast, there glittered on the sideboard a mixed service of massive and curious plate - wine-coolers, tankards, salvers, and epergnes, of many dates and countries, and of the most artistic workmanship; for Moray had a fancy that way, and his fancies had generally been gratified. A century and a half before, the mere rumor of so much portable wealth would have set all the clansmen and caterans by the ears between Lorne and Lochaber. But more than enough of description for the time, though, if I have bored my readers, the memories of Glenconan are my best excuse. Strolling about before dinner, Moray did the honors of the place to his young friends; and if eloquent admiration be the sincerest flattery, he had no reason to be dissatisfied. Though the Highland air had sharpened their appetites, he had to remind them, more than once, that it was high time to dress. Leslie, who was naturally rather taciturn, said little; but he lingered as if loath to tear himself away from the scenes where each changing impression seemed invariably a change for the better. As for Jack Venables, he jumped about like a young chamois, in the sheer exuberance of his animal spirits, at the risk of a broken neck, or, at all events, of a sprained ankle. And his gay exhilaration gratified the older man far more than the self-contained appreciation of the other. Moray had a fellow feeling for the headlong nature which would be doing or even suffering rather than be still. It was to Venables that he turned more naturally during the dinner, if he showed himself more ceremoniously hospitable to Leslie. But after all, they got on very well together; and when the cloth was removed in the good old fashion, and the decanters placed on the polished mahogany, it would have been hard to find three happier gentlemen anywhere between the Solway Firth and the Shetland Isles. "I like your dining-room, sir, almost as much as your hills," remarked Mr. Venables, surveying the former serenely over a bumper of claret; “and you'll agree with me, that is saying a good deal in its fa Jack Venables looked about him and went on: "I like the silver, I must say, even more than the stags' heads. There now! I was sure I should startle you both; but you need not look so scandalized, my dear Leslie. I'm not altogether so covetous as you might suppose, and a man may admire those magnificently chased salt-cellars, for example, without having the soul either of a pawnbroker or of a Benvenuto Cellini. But I like them chiefly for all they mean. Had Glenconan Mr. Moray did agree, and smiled com- lived his life in his native glen, we should placently. Indeed Jack Venables could have seen nothing on his walls save the hardly have been suspected of flattery, antlers and his ancestors. Moreover, I and connoisseurs in very various styles may venture to remark, parenthetically, of art might have expressed unmitigated that I doubt whether we should have had approval. The room was unpretentious Lafitte like this on the table. Now stalklike the house-long, out of proportion ing deer in Glenconan is grand sport in to its breadth, and by no means lofty. its way; but to be content with that, we But it had been turned into such a sylvan | should be born to the ambition, like Don vor." |