aily Telegraph_.

CHAPTER XI

July 19th.

_Campsie, N.B._ Hither have I fled from my buccaneering relations. I
am seeking shelter in a manse in the midst of a Scotch moor, and the
village, half a mile away, is itself five miles from a railway station.
Here I can defy Aunt Jessica.

After my conversation with Pasquale, I passed a restless night. My
slumbers were haunted by dreams of pirate yachts flying the jolly Roger,
on which the skull and crossbones melted grotesquely into a wedding-ring
and a true lovers' knot. I awoke to the conviction that so long as the
vessel remained on English waters I could find no security in London. I
resolved on flight. But whither?

Verily the high gods must hold me in peculiar favour. The first letter I
opened was from old Simon McQuhatty, my present host, a godfather of my
mother, who alone of mortals befriended us in the dark days of long ago.
He was old and infirm, he wrote, and Gossip Death was waiting for him
on the moor; but before he went to join him he would like to see Susan's
boy again. I could come whenever I liked. A telegram from Euston before
I started would be sufficient notice. I sent Stenson out with a telegram
to say I was starting that very day by the two o'clock train, and I
wrote a polite letter to my Aunt Jessica informing her of my regret
at not being able to accept her kind invitation as I was summoned to
Scotland for an indefinite period.

My old friend's ministry in the Free Kirk of Scotland is drawing to a
close; he has lived in this manse, a stone's throw from his grave,
for fifty years, and the approaching change of habitat will cost him
nothing. He will still lie at the foot of his beloved hills, and the
purple moorland will spread around him for all eternity, and the smell
of the gorse and heather will fill his nostrils as he sleeps. He is
a bit of a pagan, old McQuhatty, in spite of Calvin and the Shorter
Catechism. I should not wonder if he were the original of the story of
the minister who prayed for the "puir Deil." He planted a rowan tree by
his porch when he was first inducted into the manse, and it has grown
up with him and he loves it as if it were a human being. He has had
many bonny arguments with it, he says, on points of doctrine, and it
has brought comfort to him in times of doubt by shivering its delicate
leaves and whispering, "Dinna fash yoursel, McQuhatty. The Lord God is a
sensible body." He declares that the words are art