also, one great heavy drop, from the sufferer's under lip, where the teeth had bittten into it in agony, and the terrible effort to keep back the struggling groans. The sight of that drop was far from awaking pity in the haughty judge's breast. It seemed to excite him to some such fury as suffering is said to have excited, in reality or in seeming, in the breast of Jeffreys.

"Will you speak?" he shouted in a fury to the boy. "Ah! yes," burst from Ivie. "I will speak: I implore ye, have mercy."

A horrible chuckle of triumph issued from the cruel lips. "Mercy! Oh, yes; we will have mercy, since you have managed to find voice to ask it. Now tell us where James MacMichael is, and you shall be released from yon useful friend of ours, and even have a physician's care to ease your pains besides. So haste ye: where is he to be found?" But the triumph of the barbarous judge proved premature. Ivie moved his head with a faint gesture of despair.

"I asked for mercy," he replied faintly; "not for a reward for dishonour."

To a fresh fierce tirade of denunciations, threats, and insults he answered nothing, and the order was given for the executioners to continue their dreadful work. A fourth wedge was driven in, a fifth was being hammered down, the bone of the leg cracked, and the sufferer fainted.

At this moment there was a hubbub of some sort

around the door of the council-chamber, and then a buzz of voices, a dozen of them finally rising simultaneously into a loud cry of explanation:

"It's nane but the lad's ain mither. Let her in. Make way for the lad's mither. She'll mak' him speak, ye'll see. Let her in."

The argument of the crowd impressed the judges as so plausible that an almost immediate agreement was come to, to accept the recommendation, and scarcely a minute had elapsed since Mistress McCall had declared her name and relationship to the prisoner than she found herself confronted with that dread assemblage of the inquisitors, not of Spain, but of Great Britain, not of the Romish Church, but of the Protestant Church of the Reformation!

You see, it is the spirit of Christ, the mind of Christ, not the name, that is needed to make men Christians. "Not every one that saith unto Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of My Father which is in Heaven."

Certainly if the great object of the Government of that day had been to compel the Scotch to become rooted, to the very depths of their hearts, in hatred to Prelacy, and adhesion to Presbyterianism, no wiser step could have been taken than to inflict upon the land the nineteen years' archiepiscopate of Dr. James Sharp.

It seems to be terribly evident that, as a rule,

wherever cruel work was going forward in the country during that period, there was this bishop standing to the front of the persecutors. Is it not an awful thing to act so during life as that your name gets passed down through the ages with abhorrence? While a man is alive his haughty malice may find gratification in knowing that there is fear mingled with the hate; but he forgets that, tyrant as he is, there is yet one greater than he by whom he will be conquered. Death is

coming.

And when the man is dead all fear of him is dead too. He forgets that. He forgets too the lessons. taught him by the histories of other men like himself, that as the fear sinks down-a leaden weight, dropped into his grave and buried with him there once for all -something else springs into sudden life—a scathing contempt joins with the hate, and clings with it to his name for as long as the memory of the name itself endures.

A few years ago two gentlemen of ability and position were talking together.

"Do you see much of so and so?" asked one.

The lip of the other curled. "No," he said shortly; "I don't."

The first speaker went on with the subject: "Ah! he is very unpopular. He's well off, has a capital house, and seems anxious to entertain his old set, but his efforts don't meet with much reward, as far as I can discover."

U

"No," said the other curtly; and then he made a plunge into another topic for conversation.

A short time after I put a question quietly, to the one who had brought forward the name of the unpopular individual.

Oh!" was the answer; "well, really I do not know much about him myself. He was the triumphant bully of his school when he was a boy." Upon which I echoed my informant's "Oh," and I could not help thinking that the object of the sneer I had seen on the lip of one of his "old set" would gladly give up the half of his fortune if he could but return to his boyhood, and resign his position of triumphant bully, resigning with it the contemptuous dislike of maturer years of his own "old set."

CHAPTER XXX.

NOT A ROMAN MATRON, BUT A CHRISTIAN.

WY

HAT a position for a timid-natured, shrinking woman-one who during the past thirteen years had been a complete recluse from the world. Her seclusion had never been broken through but that once, when she paid her other visit to Edinburgh on the occasion of the execution of the suppliant, James Guthrie.

The hall seemed filled with a sea of eyes to Kate McCall's excited nerves, and, after the first dazed and frightened glance around, her own were stricken with a passing blindness. As she clung trembling to the arm of Mary Blair she scarce remembered for some moments why she was there, or whose face it was that she had tried to discover at the instant of her entrance.

A sharp, imperious voice recalled her but too quickly from those merciful seconds of oblivion. "Come forward," exclaimed one of the judges imperatively.