"Humph! poor fools. Have they never heard the housewife's proverb-' Promises and piecrust are made to be broken '?"

Whether with some half-formed idea of beginning the good offices at once, which he felt sure would be needed, he did not clearly understand, himself, but at this point in his meditations he rode back to the old woman, and left the dog in charge with her, as a gift for her brother-in-law.

"It's but a pup, at present," he said; "but I think it is sensible."

CHAPTER III.

WHO BEGAN IT?

HE bright sun of an evening in early summer was playing through the green foliage of the birch trees, and giving added richness of colour to the fir tree trunks, when a pedestrian reached the door of a little moorland shieling.

Standing there, and looking around, a stranger might almost be forgiven the idea that he had really arrived at last at that often heard of, but never hitherto discovered, region, know as the "back of beyond." But nevertheless, as a fact, the small atom of a dwelling-place was well within a strong man's afternoon walk from the noble and important city of Edinburgh.

William Blair had done the journey between the two places, to and fro, twice a day, and been none the worse for his efforts. The moral entertainment he generally received from the solitary occupant of

the

affair of far more

moorland home was an fatigue to his somewhat stolid temperament.

"But kin is kin, and has its duties," he was wont to mutter on such occasions, as though in excuse to himself for voluntarily coming in the way of such an annoyance.

Family feeling is fairly strong, it is to be hoped, all the world over, but in Scotland it is well known to be especially so, and Blair considered it an absolutely necessary part of his week's avocations, when it was anyway possible, to pay a visit to his wife's cross-grained, sharp-tongued old step-sister. Elspeth Spence on her part looked at the matter so thoroughly from her brother-in-law's point of view, claiming his attentions as her natural right, that she never felt it in the slightest incumbent on her to make them pleasant to him. Her first salutation, on this June evening of 1660, was of the kind he generally received.

Elspeth Spence was between twenty and thirty years older than her step-sister and her brother-inlaw, but though she looked aged and withered from the wear and tear of life's toils and her temper, she was still well able to attend to her own small dailybread concerns, and, above all, she was still gifted with a sharp wit, and with a ready-tongued strong voice.

This said voice was audible to William Blair whilst he was still some yards lower down the brae. The speaker was hidden within her one-roomed hut at present, but, although the dimensions of it were

of the most restricted, she seemed to consider it equally incumbent on her to exert her lungs to the utmost, in addressing the family of hens and chickens that shared her home.

The wandering propensities of one particular little fluff-ball of life led her to the door of the shieling, just as her sister's husband approached it, and it required no no effort for her capable intellect to transfer the torrent of adjurations intended for the chicken to the man.

"Hech!" she screamed at him with a resounding suddenness that almost startled even his expectant "Hech! then, ye great flat-footed, ill-faured

nerves. loon ye. How many chicks wad ye like me to put oot yon, for ye to trample to the death!"

And with a nimbleness which none would have supposed possible from her appearance, she stooped, and snatched up the adventurous fledgling, which had certainly seemed bent on committing suicide, by the way in which it had made its foolish little run right into the path of the oncoming visitor.

Blair waited silent in the sunshine until the yellow atom had been thrown with scant ceremony against the mother hen's side; and then he coolly stooped his head in at the low door, and took a calm survey of the interior, from the rag-muddle human bed, almost entirely filling up the left half, to the fowls' dingy straw-bed, nearly filling up the other.

His investigations were watched for an instant with. a lightning flash of grim amusement shining for that

brief space in the keen eyes, and then they were pounced upon with a second scream, beginning with the usual apostrophe:

"Hech! Mon, what for will ye stand speering there, like a blind beetle, then? Can ye no coom ben?"

William Blair drew his head up again, with an emphatic shake in the negative. "No, Elspeth Spence, that verily can I no do. When the snaw is under foot, and the sleet o'er head, then any shelter may be better than nane. But the day—”

He raised his eyes to the summer-blue sky, and then lowered them again to the apartment which he was invited to enter, letting them rest there with an expression in them of undisguised disgust.

"Na, na," he ejaculated; "I gi'e thanks to the powers above, that gied me a wife that knaws hoo to gi'e a mon a decent dwelling to abide in."

Old Elspeth pushed out her long upper lip, with an expression perfectly indescribable for its intense scorn. "Ach!" she remarked bitingly, "Mary is like to her mither, the bit pawky, dainty, pinkcheeked thing my daft father saw fit to bring to fill the empty place o' my ain braw, big mither. The twa o' they puir slips of things wad na mak' ain o' her."

"No," was the reply, "that may be, nor wad all the' untidinesses o' their haill lives mak' ain o' the days of yours, I'll be boun. But that's neither here nor there to my present purpose. Mary thocht maybe ye

C