de, opened up the grave. Even as they dug
their spades turned up mingled blood and clay, and when they came to the
corpse of the Hundeprest, they found it fresh as on the day he died, but
with a terrible wound in the body, from which the blood still oozed
away.

With horror they bore it out of sight of the monastery of which he had
been so unworthy a brother. A cleansing fire burned it to ashes, and a
shrewd, clean wind that blew from over the Lammermoors swept away all
trace of the accursed thing. No pestilence came to Melrose. Perchance in
the twelfth century it was by prayer and fasting that the holy men won
the day.

A BORDER MIDDY

One blustering February evening towards the close of the eighteenth
century there sat in a back room in a little inn at Portsmouth three
midshipmen, forlorn-looking and depressed to a degree quite at variance
with the commonly accepted idea of the normal mental condition of
midshipmen. It was a room, not in the famous "Blue Posts"--that hostelry
beloved by lads of their rank in the service--but in a smaller, meaner,
less frequented house in a very different quarter of the town, a quarter
none too savoury, if the truth were told.

Why they had betaken themselves to this particular tavern in preference
to that generally used by them, who can say. Perhaps--as Peter Simple's
coachman remarked on that occasion when Peter first made acquaintance
with Portsmouth--perhaps it was because they had too often "forgotten to
pay for their breakfastesses" at the "Blue Posts," and had not the
wherewithal to pay up arrears. In any case, here they were, and,
midshipman-like, during their stay they had recklessly run up a larger
bill than they had means to settle. There was no possibility of
following the course recommended by the drunken sailor, namely, to "cut
and run," for the landlady of the inn was much too astute a personage to
make that a possibility, and she had too little faith in human nature
generally, and in that of midshipmen in particular, to let her consent
to wait for her money till time and the end of their cruise again
brought their frigate back to Portsmouth. Pay they _must_, by some means
or other, for already the Blue Peter was flying at the fore and the
_Sirius_ would sail at daylight. If she sailed without them it was very
plain that there was an end of their career in the Navy--they would be
"broke." Small wonder that the three middies were in the last stage of
gloom. T