for a time when the servants were taken up at the chamber-end with their
serving, and when the bairns were busy with their noses at their plates.

"Then, when none observed, I whipped the most part of the dainty
platterful of fish underneath my apron and sat very still and innocent,
picking at the bones on my plate.

"Soon little Jock looked up. 'O mither, mither!' he cried, 'wull ye
please to look at Aunty Maisie, she has eaten the hale kane o' trootses,
banes, plate an' a', while we were suppin' our broth.'

"At this there was great wonderment, and all the children came about,
expecting to see me come to some hurt by so mighty a meal.

"'Tell me,' cried Jock, being ever the foremost, 'how far doon the
platter has gotten. Are ye sure it is not sticking somewhere by the
road?'

"All the time I sat with the half score of burn-trout on my lap covered
by my apron, and it was only by pretending I had burned myself, that I
got them at last safe out of the room."

With such tales she pleased me, winning my heart all the while, causing
me to forget my weakness, and to think the nights not long when I lay
awake listening to the piets and hoolets crying about me in the ancient
woods of Earlstoun.

CHAPTER XXX.

THE BULL OF EARLSTOUN'S HOMECOMING.

It was about this time that Sandy came home. It may seem from some parts
of this history that we agreed not over well together. But after all it
was as brothers may disagree among themselves; though they are banded
stoutly enough against all the world beside. I think it made us love one
another more that recently we had been mostly separate; and so when
Sandy came home this time and took up his old lodging in the tree, it
was certainly much heartsomer at the Earlstoun. For among other things
our mother mostly went to carry him his meals of meat, taking with her
Jean Hamilton, Sandy's wife, thus leaving only Maisie Lennox to bring me
my portion to the well-house.

But often in the gloaming Sandy himself came climbing up by the ivy on
the outside of the well-tower, letting his great body down through the
narrow broken lattice in the tiles. And in that narrow chamber we
cheered one another with talk. This I liked well enough, so long as he
spoke of Groningen and the Low Countries. But not so well when he began
to deafen me with his bickerings about the United Societies--how there
was one, Patrick Laing, a man of fierce and determined nature, that
could not company wi