sages beyond. The blue-coated warders would whistle to him, and say, "Here, poor fellow!" but he would only shake his long drooping tail for an instant, almost imperceptibly, and stand where he was. If there was a stranger present, the bluecoated warders would tell him, that that was the dog of a young swell, they had got inside for duelling, and that that dog had been there for above a week. Then the door would be shut again, and Robin would take his old post in the sun, and catch the flies.

For more than ten days he stayed there. At the end of that time he went away. The great door was open one day, and three or four warders were standing about. Robin had gone into the middle of the street, when a very tall, handsome young man came walking by with his eyes fixed on the prison.

He nearly stumbled over Robin. When Robin saw him, he leaped upon him, and the young man caught him in his bosom. And the young man was of the Scotch nation, for he said—

"It's his ain dog, if it's no his ain self. What, Robin, boy, do ye mind Gil Macdonald, and the bonny hill-sides of Ronaldsay!"

.

CHAPTER XI.

So went matters outside the prison-door, in the bright summer sunshine. Inside that door a generous, noble-minded, unselfish young man; a young man who had, in his time, according to the light which had been shown him, his lofty aspirations towards the only good he knew of, political and social success; was left without a friend or a hope, beating himself to desperation and death against his prisonbars. Dare you come in?

But, in going, we may take this comfort with us: Austin would have required very long drilling to have made a high place in public life. Of that I feel quite sure. He was far too impulsive and thoughtless; far too prone to believe the last thing which was told him, to accept the last theory put before him, and to say that it must be the best; to have

succeeded.

Practice would have given him the power of closing his ears to argument, and acting only on foregone conclusions. Practice might have given him the trick of listening to his opponent, and ignoring all his sound arguments, catching him when he tripped; would have, in time, formed him into a shallow and untruthful debater, of the third class, like—(Heaven help us, where are we getting to now?) He was born for nobler things than to be a little dog, doing the barking for big dogs, with thick skins and strong nerves, who meant biting. He would, I fear, have dropped into a low place. His habit of seeing the best side of all opinions, and of having none of his own, his terror of adverse criticism, and his almost childish anger against opponents, would have made him but a poor man for public life. He would have successively believed all creeds, till he had none of his own.

That June morning we know of, they shut the gate behind him, and he knew that it was all over and done. He felt that he had died his first death, and that the clang of that door was as the rattling of the earth on his coffin. At that moment, he saw, so great is Divine mercy, among the burnt ashes of his past life, one gleaming spark of hope; he had,

at all events, seen the worst, short of death; he was young and the world was large; his imprisonment would be over soon, only a year. The world was very large. There were other worlds besides this cruel, inexorable English one.

But that spark of hope disappeared for a time, when the sordid unbeautiful realities of his prison life began to be felt. His idea was, that he would be locked up between four walls, and left to eat his heart, until his time was out. Lucky for him it Iwas not so. There were rules in that prison, so degrading, that his mere loathing of them kept him from going mad. Little acts of discipline and punctuality, which, in his sane mind, he would have acknowledged as necessary, but which now irritated him. He had to go to chapel in the morning; he had to come out to the door of his cell, and touch his cap to the governor; and to do other things worse than this, little things, which he would not so much have cared to do when free; little things which, had he been travelling, in the desert or the bush, he would have laughed over, yet which now, when he was forced to do them, degraded him. He did not know, till afterwards, that, by powerful interest, all prison rules possible to be relaxed, had been re

A year. This was 1846. Then it would be 1847. What was the day of the month? He could not remember, and asked the policeman.

The eleventh of June. The policeman repeated it twice, and then Austin thanked him, but his mind was elsewhere. A woman who sat opposite to him, a weary witness, had got on odd boots. They were both black jean boots, and were both for the right foot. One was trodden on one side, and the other was gone at the toes, but Austin was wide awake enough to see that they were both right-foot boots. You couldn't take him in. What a fool the woman must be; perhaps she was drunk when she put them on. She looked a drunken sort of a drab. But there was something funny in it. Austin, God help him, had a quiet laugh over it; and soon they told him it was time to go.

And so he went, patient and contented enough, for happily he was just now past feeling anything acutely. As he was going down the corridor, something struck him. When he had started from home that morning, his dog Robin had followed him, and would not be driven back. He remembered that now. He asked a policeman, who was standing by, to see after the dog for him, and take him to Miss