tself loomed, a
shapeless white mound. On and on Marchbanks toiled, and, far past the
spot where last night he had parted from his comrades, something unusual
hanging to a snow post caught his eye. It was the mail-bags, securely
tied there by hands which too evidently had been bleeding from the cold;
but of guard or coachman there was never a sign. The meagre winter day
was already drawing to a close; with the gathering darkness a rising
wind drove the snow once more before it, and the clouds to windward
piled black and ominous. By himself Marchbanks was powerless to help, if
help were indeed yet possible; he could but return to Moffat and give
the alarm.

That night men with lanterns and snow-poles fought their way to
Tweedshaws, only to learn there what all had feared--neither guard nor
coachman had come through. Therefore, if by remote chance they still
lived, the men must lie buried in the snow, perhaps within very few
yards of the high-road. For two days scores of men searched every likely
spot, but never a clue they found, except Goodfellow's hat, which lay in
a peat-hag at no great distance from the post where the mail-bags had
been hung.

Then--some said it was a dream that guided them--some one thought of an
old, disused road along which there was possibility the lost men might
have made their way. There, from a drift protruded something black--a
boot; and on his back, deep buried, lay Goodfellow. Near at hand they
found MacGeorge, in an easy attitude, as if quietly sleeping, on his
face a smile--"a kind o' a pleasure," the finders called it--such a
smile, perhaps, as the face of the "good and faithful servant" may wear
when he entereth into the joy of his Lord.

Many have been the snowy years since that in which MacGeorge threw away
life for duty's sake. Besides winters, such as that hard "Crimean" one
of 1854-5, there have been, for example, the terrible season of 1860-1,
the bitter winter of 1878-9, when snow lay, practically unbroken, from
November till March, and the frost was unrelenting in severity; and
there have been others, too numerous to specify. Many a man has perished
on the hill, before and since, but no tragedy ever seized the popular
imagination so firmly as did that on the Moffat road in 1831. It is a
district lonely enough even in summer time, that joint watershed of
Tweed, Annan, and Clyde, but when winter gales sweep over those lofty
moorlands, and snow drives down before the bitter blas