passed through India at the time of the mutiny, and beheld the matchless faith and heroic valour of a handful of Englishmen, hemmed in on all hands by fierce barbarians, recover the splendid bauble which a handful of Englishmen had carelessly picked up. I knew the great Arab sheiks; I had conversed with Queen Astarte about the Asian mystery, and Tancred's maiden-speech in the Lords; I had wandered across the Steppes with the mighty Tartar hordes, and tasted of the patriarchal life. My choleric friend, Sir Sampson Legend, had been, no doubt, in some respects more adventurous than myself. 'I know the length of the Emperor of China's foot; I have kissed the great Mogul's slippers, and rid a-hunting upon an elephant with the Cham of Tartary. Body o' me, I have made a cuckold of a king, and the present Majesty of Bantam is the issue of these loins.' Yet I dare say that, during the last eighteen or nineteen years, owing of course to the increased facilities for locomotion, I have traversed as great a portion of the earth's surface as the Wandering Jew succeeded in traversing during as many

centuries.

The nomadic is indeed a noble life. Yet as you grow old, you begin to fancy that it is about time to bring your wanderings to a close. Travel-stained and travel-sore, you are fain to return to Ithaca, if the gods only will give their consent. Not that Ithaca is fairer or better than other lands; not so indeed; it is only a bleak scrap of rock, where the goats feed, and round which the sea-mews wheel. But, then, O adorable

Calypso, Ithaca is Home, and the patient wife and the mild Telemachus await our return.

So one day I went home. The grey and weatherbeaten farm-house, where so many generations of our name had lived simple lives, and died easy deaths, among their flocks and herds, still stood upon the bents beside the sea. Yet something ailed the place. They had all left, it is true; but for that I was prepared. I knew that they had been carried one by one through the standing corn, or across the new-ploughed furrows, to a quiet little churchyard, which stands quite by itself upon the moorland, and which is seldom disturbed, except when a large-eyed owl flits through the tombstones in the moonlight, or a rustic procession, clad in decent, if somewhat threadbare black, and bringing with them, shoulder-high, a fir coffin, rudely sawn and nailed together by the village carpenter, wends down to it through the heather. Thirty years is a large space in the life of perishing men; but I had not expected to find the whole records of a generation so completely blotted out. Except the 'I. L.' which I had carved for little Isabel upon the willow which dips its branches into the burn, there was no trace of the busy life which I had left behind me. The new people had many arrows in their quiver, and a houseful of children were playing in the mud before the kitchen-door, with the ducklings and goslings, as I approached. Poor little souls! they seemed happy enough, I thought; though it is a mystery to me how children continue to preserve their gaiety now-a-days. Don't you know, my dears,

that thirty, or forty, or fifty years ago, we, too, were playing in the mud; we, too, were sailing our bits of ships in the mill-dam; we, too, were as happy as ducks in the rain, and as dirty as the day was long? And you see what it has all come to already: most of us lying quite still up yonder on the hill-side below the heather; only one tough, asthmatic campaigner, who is apt to shiver in the very brightest sunshine, and who is often as cross, and sulky, and unsociable as a grisly bear unexpectedly wakened out of his winter nap, being left ungathered. Nay, do not let us begin to preach. Only I found very quickly that though the old farm-house still stands, the home of forty years ago had not now any local habitation in this world. So I turned my face away. I could not remain in a dwelling which even the ghosts had ceased to haunt. It was a place to make a pilgrimage to at times (when one's memory had become. less exacting), but not to live in; to die in, perhaps; but I had plenty of life in me yet. There is always one member of a family whom Death seems to forget, and who might go on living for ever, if he liked, and had a taste for Nonconformity.

Her Majesty's mail in these parts, and in these days, consisted of a very old gig, drawn by a much older horse, and driven by, I suppose, the very oldest coachman in the world—at least, he had driven the mail in the days of my boyhood, and he was still driving it when I returned in my old age. When I had taken my place beside him (there was only room for one passenger beside the driver), I confess I felt more at home than I

had felt at any time since my return to my native district. The old fellow was pleasant and chatty, and had a sort of agricultural obituary, which was not without interest to one who retained a vague recollection of the names which formed the landmarks of his memory. Auld Drumwhalloch had deed the winter after the drought; Kilcuddy was aye girnin' about the price o' oats, and gaed out as the grub cam in; Pittendreech was never like himsel after the '45, or it micht be the '46—na, it was the '45-the year the neaps gaed wrang, and Sandy Pirie took a nineteen years' lease o' the Lews. So the old fellow rambled on, stage after stage, until, late at night, we entered a considerable city, and the old horse came to a dead stop in front of 'The Royal George,' whose brightly-lighted windows gleamed pleasantly and hospitably through the darkness.

Hazeldean, I found, was rather a nice town in its way. It had broad streets, substantially-built dwellinghouses, good shops, a policeman at any corner where he was not wanted, a dozen churches, a town-house, a civic magistracy, and a Lord Provost; and the Lord Provost of Hazeldean was within the municipality quite as great a man as the Lord Mayor of London. I do not know that all these solid attractions would have secured my affections. I think not. But as I pursued my researches, under the guidance of mine host of the 'George' (he did not accompany me in person, for, to tell the truth, he seldom moves out of his bar; but we had a chat in the morning before I started), I came at last upon a retired and far-away suburb, lying among

green trees and murmuring brooks, whose delicate and modest charm I could not resist. It was a case of love at first sight; and love at first sight is the only love in which I believe. That is to say, if a woman does not win your regard during the first day you meet, she will scarcely win it afterwards. She must in that case be so obnoxious that the more you know her the less you like her. But if she be pretty and witty, with a sweet temper and a low voice, you are sure to lose your heart within twenty or thirty minutes of your meeting. Mind, I do not say that you marry her marriage is a matter of opportunity: but if you live in the country with her for a week, and get her after lunch to drive you down in her pony-carriage to see the geese on the pond, the chances are about a hundred to one that you do. Some marriages may be made in heaven, but a great many more are made in country houses.

The dwellings in this suburb are of a quaint, oldfashioned, and cunning architecture. The outside walls are covered with ivy and China roses, and the roofs are white with lichens, which the heaviest thunder shower never entirely washes off. Where they got their chimneys I cannot say; but such a collection of Dutch tops was never seen anywhere else. Every house must have had a builder of its own; and each builder has allowed his fancy to run at random into the wildest and most grotesque freaks. The consequence is, that what between the green things that cling to the walls and that hide the roofs, and the serpent-like undulations, the unpremeditated twists and contortions, in which the