s contents overflowed into the chamber, and by
a jerk of the hand revealed a strange accumulation of dusty documents in
paper and in parchment. He looked at them with an aspect of disgust, and
stirred them with a contemptuous toe as if he meddled with the litter of
a stye.

"That's Drimdarroch!" said he, intensely bitter; "that's Drimdarroch,
and Duntorvil, that's the Isles, the bonny Isles of Lochow; that's damn
like to be Doom too! That and this ruckle of stones we sit in are all
that's left of what was my father's and my grandfather's and their
forebears back till the dark of time. And how is it, ye may ask? Let us
pretermit the question till another occasion; anyway here's Drimdarroch
wi' the lave, at any rate the weight of it in processes, records,
caveats, multiple poindings, actions of suspension and declator, interim
decrees, fugie warrants, compts, and reckonings--God! I have the cackle
of the law in my head like a ballant, and what's the wonder at that wi'
all my practice?"

He stooped and picked up from the confused heap of legal scrivenings by
finger-tips that seemed to fear infection a parchment fouled with its
passage through the courts and law offices. "You're in luck indeed,"
said he; "for there's Drimdarroch--all that's left of it to me: the land
itself is in the hands of my own doer, Petullo the writer down-by, and
scab seize his bestial!"

Back he threw the relic of his patrimony; he dropped the curtain; he
turned on his guest a face that tried to smile. "Come, let us sit down
again," he said, "and never heed my havers. Am I not thankful to have
Doom itself left me, and the company of the hills and sea? After all,
there are more Drimdarrochs than one in the Highlands, for the name
means just 'the place at the back of the oak-wood or the oaken shaw,'
and oaks are as plentiful hereabout as the lawyers are in the burgh
down-by. I but mentioned it to show you the delicacy of your search, for
you do not know but what I'm the very man you want, though I'm sitting
here looking as if acting trusty for the Hanoverian cause did not fill
my pouches."

"_Tenez!_ M. Bethune was scarcely like to send me to Doom in that case,"
said the Count laughing.

"But Bethune, like yourself, may never have seen the man."

"But yes, it is true, he did not see him any more than I did.
Drimdarroch, by all accounts, was a spendthrift, a player, a _bavard_,
his great friends, Glengarry and another Scot, Balhaldie--"

"Oh,