s o' the auld Humes aboot yer lugs?"

The boys fled amain, and the old man came growling to the mouth of the
aisle.

"The deevil's in the bairns o' Polwarth," said he; "for they wad disturb
the very dead in their graves. I'll declare, they've the stane frae the
mouth o' the aisle!"

He stooped down, and Sir Patrick saw his grim visage through the
aperture, and heard him thus continue his soliloquy, as he replaced the
stone--

"Sorrow tak the hands that moved the stane! Ye're hardly worth the
covering up again, for ye're a profitless hole to me; and I fancy him
that I should lay in ye next, be he whaur he likes, will gang the gate
that his freend Bailie gaed yesterday on a scaffold. A gravedigger's a
puir bisness, I am sorry to say, in our king's reign; and the fient a
ane thrives but the common executioner."

So saying, he enveloped Sir Patrick in utter darkness. That night Grizel
and her father left the aisle together, and from her he learned the
particulars of what he had heard muttered by the gravedigger, that his
friend, Mr Bailie of Jerviswoode, had been executed the previous day.

Disguised, and in the character of a surgeon, he by byways reached
London, and from thence fled to France. On the death of Charles, and
when the bigot James ascended the throne, Sir Patrick was one of the
leaders of the band of patriots who drew their swords in behalf of a
Protestant succession.

That enterprise was unsuccessful; and, after contending, almost
singlehanded, against the enemies of his religion and his country, he
and his family sought refuge in a foreign land. He assumed the name of
Dr Peter Wallace, and they took up their abode in Utrecht. There poverty
and privations sought and found the exiles. They had parted with every
domestic, and the lovely Grizel was the sole servant and helper of her
mother, and, when their work was done, the assistant of her father in
the education of the younger children; for he had no longer the means of
providing them a tutor. Yet theirs was a family of love--a family of
happiness; and poverty purified their affections. But their remittances
from Scotland were not only scanty but uncertain. Till now Sir Patrick
had borne his misfortunes with resignation, and even cheerfulness; he
cared not that he was stripped of attendants, and of every luxury of
life; yet at times the secret and unbidden tears would start into his
eyes, as he beheld his wife and his fair daughter performing, without