iar pony-chaise along the
old familiar hill-side roads, whence you look down on ether loch--
sometimes on both--lying like a sheet of silver below.

Man a drive they took every day, the weather being still and clam, as it
often is at Cairnforth, by fits and snatches, all winter through.

"I think there never was such a place as this place," the earl would
often say, when he stopped at particular points of view, and gazed his
fill on every well-known outline of the hills and curve of the lochs,
generally ending with a smiling look on the face beside him, equally
familiar, which had watched all these things with him for more than
thirty years. "Helen, I have had a happy life, or it seems so, looking
back upon it. Remember, I said this, and let no one ever say the
contrary."

And in all the houses they visited--farm, cottage, or bothie--
every body noticed how exceedingly happy the earl looked, how cheerfully
he spoke, and how full of interest he was in every thing around him.

"His lordship may live to be an auld man yet," said some one to Malcolm,
and Malcolm indignantly repudiated the possibility of any thing else.

The minister was left a little lonely during this week of Lord
Cairnforth's coming home, but he did not seem to feel it. He felt
nothing very much now except pleasure in the sunshine and the fire, in
looking at the outside of his books, now rarely opened, and in watching
the bright faces around him. He was made to understand what a grand
festival was to be held at Cairnforth, and the earl took especial pains
to arrange that the feeble octogenarian should be brought to the Castle
without fatigue, and enabled to appear both at the tenants' feast in the
kitchen, and the more formal banquet of friends and neighbors in the
hall--the grand old dining-room--which was arranged exactly as it
had been on the earl's coming of age.

However, there was a difference. Then the board was almost empty, now
it was quite full. With a carefulness that at the time Helen almost
wondered at, the earl collected about him that day the most brilliant
gathering he could invite from all the country round--people of
family, rank, and wealth--above all, people of worth; who, either by
inherited position, or that high character which is the best possession
of all, could confer honor by their presence, and who, since "a man is
known by his friends," would be suitable and creditable friends to a
young man just entering the worl