what manner of literature prevailed in these wilds. And the book gave him great cheer, for it was an old French folio of arms, 'Les Arts de L'homme d'Epée; ou, Le Dictionnaire du Gentilhomme,' by one Sieur de Guille. Doom Castle was a curious place, but apparently Hugh Bethune was in the right when he described its master as "ane o' the auld gentry, wi' a tattie and herrin' to his dejeune, but a scholar's book open against the ale-jug." A poor Baron (of a vastly different state from the Baron of France), English spoken too, with not much of the tang of the heather in his utterance though droll of his idiom, hospitable (to judge from the proffered glass still being fumbled for in the cupboard), a man who had been in France on the right side, a reader of the beau langage, and a student of the lore of arme blanche-come, here was luck!

And the man himself? He brought forward his spirits in a bottle of quaint Dutch cut, with hollow pillars at each of its four corners, and two glasses extravagantly tall of stem, and he filled out the drams upon the table, removing with some embarrassment before he did so the book of arms. It surprised Count Victor that he should not be in the native tartan of the Scots Highlander. Instead he wore a demure coat and breeches of some dark fabric, and a wig conferred on him all the more of the look of a lowland merchant than of a chief of clan. He was a man at least twenty years the senior of his visitora handsome man of his kind, dark, deliberate of his movements, bred in the courtesies, but seemingly, to the acuter intuitions of Montaiglon, possessed of one unpardonable weakness in a gentleman-a shame of his obvious penury.

"I have permitted myself, M. le Baron, to interrupt you on the counsel of a common friend," said Count Victor, anxious to put an end to a situation somewhat droll.

"After the goblet, after the goblet," said Lamond softly, himself but sipping at the rim of his glass.

"It is the custom of the country-one of the few that's like to be left to us before long."

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À la santé de la bonne cause!" said the Count politely, choking upon the fiery liquor, and putting down the glass with an apology.

I am come from France-from Saint Germains," he said. "You may have heard of my uncle; I am the Count de Montaiglon.'

The Baron betrayed a moment's confusion.

66 Do you tell me, now?" said he. "Then you are the more welcome. I wish I could say so in your own language—that is, so far as ease goes, known to me only in letters. From Saint Germains————” making a step or two up and down the room, with a shrewd glance upon his visitor in the bygoing- "H'm, I've been there on a short turn myself; there are several of the Highland gentry about the place.'

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"There is one Bethune-Hugh Bethune of Ballimeanach, Baron," replied Count Victor meaningly. Knowing that I was coming to this part of the world, and that a person of my tongue and politics might be awkwardly circumstanced in the province of Argyll, he took the liberty to give me your direction as one in whose fidelity I might repose myself. I came across the sleeve to Albion and skirted your noisy eastern coast with but one name of a friend, pardieu, to make the strange cliffs

cheerful."

"You are very good," said the Baron simply, with half a bow. "And Hugh Bethune, now-well, well! I am proud that he should mind of his old friend. in the tame Highlands. Good Hugh!"-a strange wistfulness came to the Baron's utterance-" Good Hugh! he'll wear tartan when he has the notion, I'm supposing, though, after all, he was no Gael, or a very far-out one, for all that he was in the Marischal's tail."

"I have never seen him in the tartan, beyond perhaps a waistcoat of it at a bal masque.

"So? And yet he was a man generally full of Highland spirit."

Count Victor smiled.

"It is perhaps his only weakness that nowadays he carries it with less dignity than he used to do. A good deal too much of the Highland spirit, M. le Baron, wears hoops, and comes into France in Leith frigates."

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Ay, man!" said the Baron, heedless of the irony, "and Hugh wears the tartan ? "

"Only in the waistcoat," repeated Count Victor, complacently looking at his own scallops.

"Even that!" said the Baron, with the odd wistfulness in his voice. And then he added hurriedly, "Not that the tartan's anything wonderful. It cost the people of this country a bonny penny one way or another. There's nothing honest men will take to more readily than the breeks, say I-the douce, honest breeks

"Unless it be the petticoats," murmured the Count, smiling, and his fingers went to the pointing of his moustache.

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Nothing like the breeks; the philabeg was aye telling your parentage in every line, so that you could not go over the moor to Lennox there but any drover by the roadside kent you for a small clan or a family of caterans. Some people will be grumbling that the old dress should be proscribed, but what does it matter?

"The tartan is forbidden?" guessed Count Victor, somewhat puzzled.

Doom flushed; a curious gleam came into his eyes; he turned to fumble noisily with the glasses as he replaced them in the cupboard.

"I thought that was widely enough known," said he. "Put down by the law, and perhaps a good business too. Diaouil!" He came back to the table with this muttered objurgation, sat and stared into the grey film of the peat-fire. "There was a

story in every line," said he, "a history in every check, and we are odd creatures in the glens, Count, that we could never see the rags without minding what they told. Now the tartan's in the dye-pot, and you'll see about here but crotal-colour-the old stuff stained with lichen from the rock."

"Ah, what damage!" said Count Victor with sympathetic tone. "But there are some who wear it yet?"

The Baron started slightly. "Sir?" he questioned, without taking his eyes from the embers.

"The precipitancy of my demands upon your gate and your hospitality must have something of an air of an impertinence," said Count Victor briskly, unbuckling his sword and laying it before him on the table; "but the cause of it lay with several zealous gentlemen, who were apparently not affected by any law against tartan, for tartan they wore, and sans culottes too, though the dirt of them made it difficult to be certain of either fact. In the East it is customary, I believe, for the infidel to take off his boots when he intrudes on sacred ground; nothing is said about stockings, but I had to divest myself of both boots and stockings. I waded into Doom a few minutes ago, for all the world like an oyster-man with my bag on my back."

"Good God!" cried the Baron. "I forgot the tide. Could you not have whistled?"

"Whole operas, my dear M. le Baron, but the audience behind me would have made the performance so necessarily allegretto as as to be ineffective. It was wade at once or pipe and perish. Mon Dieu! but I believe you are right; as an honest man I cannot approve of my first introduction to your tartan among its own mountains."

"It must have been one of the corps of watches; it must have been some of the king's soldiers," suggested the Baron.

Count Victor shrugged his shoulders. "I think I

know a red-coat when I see one," said he.

"These were quite unlicensed hawks, with the hawk's call for signal too."

"Are you sure?" cried the Baron, standing up, and still with an unbelieving tone.

"My dear M. le Baron, I killed one of the birds to look at the feathers. That is the confounded thing too! So unceremonious a manner of introducing myself to a country where I desire me above all to be circumspect; is it not so?"

As he spoke he revealed the agitation that his flippant words had tried to cloak-by a scarcely perceptible tremor of the hand that drummed the table, a harder note in his voice, and the biting of his moustache. He saw that Doom guessed his perturbation, and he compelled himself to a careless' laugh, got lazily to his feet, twisted his moustache points, drew forth his rapier with a flourish, and somewhat theatrically saluted and lunged in space as if the action gave his tension ease.

The Baron for a moment forgot the importance of what he had been told as he watched the graceful beauty of the movement, that revealed not only some eccentricity but personal vanity of a harmless kind and wholesome tastes and talents.

"Still I'm a little in the dark," he said when the point dropped and Count Victor recovered.

"Pardon," said his guest. "I am vexed at what you may perhaps look on as a trifle. The ruffians attacked me a mile or two farther up the coast, shot my horse below me, and chased me to the very edge of your moat. I made a feint to shoot one with my pistol, and came closer on the gold than I had intended."

"The Macfarlanes!" cried Doom, with every sign of uneasiness. "It's a pity, it's a pity; not that a man more or less of that crew makes any difference, but the affair might call for more attention to this place and your presence here than might be altogether wholesome for you or me."