schemers deserve being buried along with their
capital in quagmires. Heavens! how they--the quagmires--suck in the
dung! You say they don't suck it in--well, then, they spew it out--it
evaporates--and what is the worth of weeds? Lime whitens a moss, that is
true, but so does snow. Snow melts--what becomes of lime no mortal knows
but the powheads--them it poisons, and they give up the ghost. Drains
are dug deep nowadays--and we respect Mr Johnstone. So are gold mines.
But from gold mines that precious metal--at a great expense, witness its
price--is exterred; in drains that precious metal, witness wages, is
interred, and then it becomes _squash_. Stirks starve--heifers are hove
with windy nothing--with oxen frogs compete in bulk with every prospect
of a successful issue, and on such pasturage where would be the virility
of the Bulls of Bashan?

If we be in error, we shall be forgiven at least by all lovers of the
past, and what to the elderly seems the olden time. Oh, misery for that
Moor! Hundreds, thousands, loved it as well as we did; for though it
grew no grain, many a glorious crop it bore--shadows that glided like
ghosts--the giants stalked--the dwarfs crept; yet sometimes were the
dwarfs more formidable than the giants, lying like blackamoors before
your very feet, and as you stumbled over them in the dark, throttling as
if they sought to strangle you, and then leaving you at your leisure to
wipe from your mouth the mire by the light of a straggling
star;--sunbeams that wrestled with the shadows in the gloom--sometimes
clean flung, and then they cowered into the heather, and insinuated
themselves into the earth; sometimes victorious, and then how they
capered in the lift, ere they shivered away--not always without a hymn
of thunder--in behind the clouds, to refresh themselves in their
tabernacle in the sky.

Won't you be done with this Moor, you monomaniac? Not for yet a little
while--for we see Kitty North all by himself in the heart of it, a boy
apparently about the age of twelve, and happy as the day is long, though
it is the Longest Day in all the year. Aimless he seems to be, but all
alive as a grasshopper, and is leaping like a two-year-old across the
hags. Were he to tumble in, what would become of the personage whom
Kean's Biographer would call "the future Christopher the First?" But no
fear of that--for at no period of his life did he ever overrate his
powers--and he knows now his bound to an inch. Cap,