it too, and had calculated her chances.

So he hesitated, and she pouted and coaxed, and looked so lovely in her eagerness, that at last Christopher plumped out with the question as to whether she would be his wife? Yes, she would; but only on condition that he brought her the diamonds to revel in, to gloat over, to belong to her for ten minutes.

The Earl went off for three days' hunting in the north, and Christopher, fired by the promised reward, watched his opportunity and accomplished the deed. In haste and flurry he possessed himself of the diamonds; then, leaving the iron door open in his agitation, off he hied to the boat, and rowed wildly along the coast and into the narrow creek which cut inland, and close by the side of which stood the house of the old fisherman who was Molly's uncle. The tide was high, and floated him up almost to the window where she was in wait.

The diamonds were handed up. Molly received them with a scream, and disappeared with them from the window, while Christopher, in an agony, waited to have them back again. Five minutes passed, then the allotted ten, and she had not reappeared. His terror was growing unbearable.

He

called to her but she did not hear him, for she was clapping her hands and dancing about with joy before a broken glass. When at last she came to the window, the diamonds were on her neck, flashing in the moonlight, and there was a look of reckless wildness in her eyes. Give back the diamonds! She could not-it would kill her. She did not care what might happen to him or to her: they might cut off her head to get the diamonds off, but part with them she could not. She spoke the simple truth.

In point of fact, she had not meant to keep them, but she had never seen such things before, and they had upset the small amount of common-sense she had ever possessed. Her brain was too weak to stand such strong stimulants as this. The girl was simply drunk with diamonds.

From prayers Christopher got to threats, and claimed his promise, but she was far beyond the point of being reasoned with. He could not betray her without betraying himself, and besides, she had always found him ridiculous, and could not seriously be expected to marry a man with one eye; and the blue ribbon had been flimsy, and the shoes were frightful and several sizes too large, and didn't fit at all, she would have nothing further to do, either with them or with him, there! one, two, they came flying through the window, number one splash into the water, number two bump into the boat. And then came a last word of warning through the chink of a closing pane-"You had better row hard, for they are moving already."

A glance in the direction of the house showed him moving lights and running figures. The safedoor had been found open — he was lost. In a panic he threw himself on his oars and rowed for his life towards the open sea. He rowed for hours, till at last his aching arms dropped, and he crouched down exhausted on the floor of his boat. Here, as he crouched, his hand touched something soft, and by the light of the moon he recognised the cloth shoe which Molly had scornfully flung after him-literally cast in his teeth. Despite the rage which filled his heart against her, he did not chuck the shoe overboard. This clumsy formation of cloth

had been toiled over so lovingly by him, it represented so much burning of the midnight oil, that even now he could not bring himself to think of it as anything but precious. "And yet she said that it did not fit," he sighed, as he carefully stowed it away in his pocket, with perhaps some obscure idea of future revenge dawning dimly in his brain. When day light came, he was out of sight of land and faint with hunger. Too weak to row, he drifted about for another day and night, and on the evening of the second day lost consciousness. When he recovered his senses he was on board a big steamer a transatlantic boat, which had picked him up; and New York being this steamer's destination, it consequently became his. He set foot on the American continent without a sixpence in his pocket; but, thanks to his universal handiness, he did not starve. After a time of rough and hand-to-mouth existence, he even got into comparatively smooth water; and now he set himself to realise a dream which had haunted him ever since he had found the cloth shoe at the bottom of his boat. He had treasured it religiously-half in tenderness and half in bitterness; and often, when his day's work was over, and he sat alone in the garret or the cellar which just then happened to be his lodging, he would bring out the shoe from its hiding-place and sit gazing at his rejected handiwork with a look of injured pride and sore perplexity. "And yet she said that it did not fit," was the remark with which he invariably capped his reflections. Even in his brightest days poor Christopher had never been much more than half-witted; and ever since that terrible night of the diamonds, it seemed as if all his remaining

senses had left his head and taken refuge in his fingers. In proportion as he grew more queer and crotchety, he also grew more wonderfully neat-handed. Two ideas now governed his life: one, a morbid and insane woman-hatred; the other, a fanatical desire to prove to the faithless one that Christopher Swan could make shoes, and shoes that did fit, though never— no, never again-should they be made to fit her feet, those wicked white feet which had trampled the life from his heart and the joy from his world. It was with this idea that he apprenticed himself to a shoemaker, and worked at his trade with frenzied zeal. There is no saying whether in his most sanguine moments Christopher, who now called himself Samuel Foote, did not see visions of the future, in which Molly on her knees conjured him for a pair of shoes of his own world-famed workmanship while he sternly and bitterly refused. Most probably, also, it was some lurking and crazy dread of being trapped into working for the traitress Molly that had been the first origin of his repugnance to making or mending a woman's shoe. In time it crystallised into a fixed idea.

After an absence of close upon twenty years, "Samuel Foote" returned to Europe, home-sick. The dread of being tracked as the diamond-robber still occasionally haunted him; but stronger than this dread was the fascination which led him back to the scenes of his unhappy youth. Can the man with the hidden treasure ever be quite content away from it? Samuel Foote had a hidden treasure, and one from which he had been forced to fly, without raising so much as one pennyworth of it; one from which prudence had compelled him to live widely severed

for very many years, but one which nevertheless he dwelt on daily. In proportion as his terror of the law wore off, the longing to revisit his treasure grew strong within him. A thousand questions tormented him; was it still his treasure, and his alone? Or had others chanced upon it as he had done? Did the precious copper still glisten in that hidden place as he had seen it glisten on that fortunate day of his discovery, and as it glistened now so often in his weary dreams; or was it all torn from the rock, gone up "to grass," backed and dressed and smelted and dispersed throughout the world? When he thought of his treasure as thus falling a prey to another pick than his own, Samuel Foote's eye would roll and his mouth would water, like the mouth of a dog who has to stand and look on from afar while another dog is disinterring his most highly cherished and most scientifically buried bone. It was this pursuing thought which closed in upon him year by year, and which finally, like an ever-tightening cord, drew him back to Choughshire.

The treasure was intact, as he very soon convinced himself, to his immeasurable joy; and from that moment he felt that he was chained to Gullyscoombe ground. In the solitary position he had chosen he believed himself safe from recognition; and now his attachment to the spot which, for years past, had been more of a sentimental feeling than anything else, began to assume a more practical, or, to speak truly, a more than ever unpractical shape. His ambition was nothing less than to secretly trade with the copper, and to trade with America, as he instantly decided. Ever since his return to the country, he had been patiently and laboriously amassing what was to be his first cargo to the New World, to be conveyed

thither in some manner not yet matured in his mind. At the time of Maud's appearance on the scene, the little hole below his workshop, which he called his cellar, was all but blocked up with sacks filled with the lumps of rough ore. In the extraction of the ore from the rock, in that hidden place which he alone knew of, he used every imaginable precaution,-never visiting the spot by daylight for fear of detection, and cleansing himself with the most elaborate care from every stain of that treacherous red iron-earth, which would have been almost as fatal to his secret as a blood-stain might be to that of the murderer. And yet his caution was, in fact, nothing but a mixture of morbid cunning and reckless imprudence. The defence which he put up with the one hand he knocked down with the other. While he was cautious enough to hedge round his mining operations with the darkness of night, he was at the same time incautious enough to display the pick of his specimen ores as chimney-piece ornaments in the broadest glare of day. Terrified though he was of being identified as Christopher Swan, he yet fell back unconsciously into his old habit of cutting hazel twigs and hanging them up on his wall, as he had done in the days of his dowsingrod celebrity, though here again he would make crooked attempts to undo the effects of his own incaution by talking of the magic sticks as "unholy," as was the fashion just then among the more bigoted inhabitants of the country. This hanging-up of the divining-rods was one of the distinct flaws in his otherwise exaggerated caution,vacuums, so to say, which corresponded with the startling peculiarities in the symmetrical but senseless arrangement of his room. But the most curious feature in the

-

NOWHERE else in the British Isles is there such a mountain-group as that which is to be met with in the southern part of the Isle of Skye. The region I refer to is bounded to the eastward by Strath Suardal, on the west by Glen Brittle, north and south by the sea. It contains within it the series of "Red Hills," as they are commonly called, composed mainly of granite; the range of Blath Bheinn; and, incomparably ruggedest and gloomiest of all, the Cuillins. These two last are altogether different in colour, mineral character, and structural aspect, from the adjacent Red Hills; and are invested, more especially the Cuillins, with a peculiar savageness that can hardly fail to impress itself on any one who sets eyes on them. Moreover, they enclose in their iron grip the water of the famed Loch Coruisg, which some of our best modern artists have essayed to paint, and the great "Wizard of the North was moved to celebrate in song. Many tourists, English, Scotch, Irish, American, find their way annually along the beaten roads of this wild tract of country, and catch sight at time: of the crests of its darksome eminences, but not a man in a hundred ever attempts the ascent of any one of those scarred up-towering heights, which at every end and turn of his rambles in these parts he sees overshadowing him. Still less would one in a thousand of

"

-Tord of the Isles.

those who betake themselves to Coruisg by the usual routes think of scaling the tremendous spires and precipices which immure its

waters.

It fell to me quite recently in the course of professional duty (not for the first time) to have to spend a few days climbing these peaks for topographical purposes; and with the aid of the notes of a diary kept during the work, I propose to take the reader with me to some of the more remarkable spots I visited.

The month was August. From the wilds of Ross-shire I found myself transplanted to Skye, and bundled bag and baggage out of the coasting steamer into the ferryboat which puts one ashore at Broadford. Here the well-known comfortable inn served as a convenient headquarter for the first two or three days, whence to explore within practicable driving or walking distance. After waiting a couple of days in enforced idleness, while every hill great and small in the neighbourhood was wrapped nearly to its foot in a white shroud of mist, and the rain fell almost unceasingly, I got away to the nearest of the "Red Hills," that which culminates in Beinn-na-Cailleich (the old wife's mount). The way I took for the ascent is, I think, as good as any. Keep to the highroad towards Torran along Strath Suardal, pass the old ruined chapel Cill Chriosd