your uncle doesn't want you, and bring him if he will come . . . which he will if you coax him and tell him all about it. Remember, you have a mother as well as a father, now."

Louisa, looking at the Squire as he stood at this moment under a great oak tree-owner, she knew, of a great estate stretching for miles every way, yet willing at once to give his son to the girl he loved-could not help admiring the noble simplicity of the man. This girl had read and thought; had read novels and pseudophilosophy and pseudo-politics and pseudotheology and a myriad other things which attract an active female intellect; and from these studies she had gathered many false impressions which her own unusual clearness of sight had in a great degree corrected. Still prejudices remained. She retained some few of the follies of the girl who has been taught that Church and State are a mistake, that our ancestors were apes, that women ought to be independent of men, and that the modern

prophetess is, not Joanna Southcote, but Alethea Fretful.

But when she saw the Squire, a mighty Englishman of heroic mould, lean against an oak which one of his fathers had planted, and smile pleasantly on her amid the summer sunshine, and treat her as a daughter without cavil or comment, she could not help recognizing his nobleness and her own silliness.

66 Equal at toil and peril, romp and revel :

Had he feared God, he might have feared the Devil."

ATTY NUGENT, as his uncle liked

WATTY

to call him, was fearless and fearsome. To some extent he resembled the panther Cleopatra, gift of Hathor the Nubian; being most attractive and charming to a new acquaintance, yet suddenly developing a frightening faculty-showing his teeth, and growling -in a way that amazed weak minds, especially female minds. It is questionable whether there was perfect truth in the story he told his uncle of his reason for leaving England. It is doubtful whether he was at all afraid of Musical

VOL. I.

ΙΟ

Willie's rivalry with Jessy Blair of Elgin. It is doubtful indeed whether he and Jessie had not achieved an intimacy which rendered marriage a mere work of supererogation. Such notions entered not the brain of Willie Nairn, who received the truant as if he had been his own son, and made him at home, and introduced him to his good friends at Silchester, as we have seen. Everybody of the small circle welcomed him. The Squire and his son and daughter liked this new Odysseus; so likewise did Louisa. He found himself in capital quarters. At his uncle's, at Silchester, at Silchester Rectory, he was equally at home. After roughing it all over the world, imagine how pleasant a life for the wanderer. Odysseus himself having slain the suitors in Ithaca, and pottering about the island with his dear. old father Laertes, could hardly have felt happier.

Watty was the most plausible of men, but Donald misliked him. Your Highlander has a

touch of the dog in him, and judges by instinct. Donald, who had the true courtesy of a wellborn servitor, could hardly bring himself to be civil to Mr. Nugent. He did not know why. But God gives us these flashes of feeling—we don't know why. Donald felt alongside Nugent as Donald's Scottish colley would have felt alongside Nugent's panther. Your panther is a cat, intolerable to a dog. There are cats and dogs among men and women.

As to Walter Nugent himself, he quite valued his niche. He was all things to all men. He enjoyed Musical Willie's cheery songs, prompted by whisky toddy. He quite revered the Squire, and deemed his library the noblest in the world, and his ideas the most original. He listened to the Doctor's racy talk, and intelligently responded, and quoted Arbuthnot. He enjoyed Silvester's verse, and tried to cap it with some of his own, and admitted failure. He sat devoutly attentive in Silchester Church while the Rev. Arundel