case her government's accredited ambassadors relax in the
performance of their duty."

"Salemina!" called a laughing voice outside the door. "I am
won'erful lifted up. You will be a prood woman the day, for I am now
Estaiblished!" and Francesca, clad in Miss Grieve's Sunday bonnet,
shawl, and black cotton gloves, entered, and curtsied demurely to the
floor. She held, as corroborative detail, a life of John Knox in her
hand, and anything more incongruous than her sparkling eyes and mutinous
mouth under the melancholy head-gear can hardly be imagined.

"I am now Estaiblished," she repeated. "Div ye ken the new asseestant
frae Inchcawdy pairish? I'm the mon' (a second deep curtsy here).
"I trust, leddies, that ye'll mak' the maist o' your releegious
preevileges, an' that ye'll be constant at the kurruk.--Have you given
papa's consent, Salemina? And isn't it dreadful that he is Scotch?"

"Isn't it dreadful that she is not?" asked Mr. Macdonald. "Yet to my
mind no woman in Scotland is half as lovable as she!"

"And no man in America begins to compare with him," Francesca
confessed sadly. "Isn't it pitiful that out of the millions of our own
countrypeople we couldn't have found somebody that would do? What do
you think now, Lord Ronald Macdonald, of these dangerous international
alliances?"

"You never understood that speech of mine," he replied, with prompt
mendacity. "When I said that international marriages presented more
difficulties to the imagination than others, I was thinking of your
marriage and mine, and that, I knew from the first moment I saw you,
would be extremely difficult to arrange!"

Chapter XXVI. 'Scotland's burning! Look out!'

'And soon a score of fires, I ween,
From height, and hill, and cliff were seen;
. . . . . . .
Each after each they glanced to sight,
As stars arise upon the night,
They gleamed on many a dusky tarn,
Haunted by the lonely earn;
On many a cairn's grey pyramid,
Where urns of mighty chiefs lie hid.'

The Lay of the Last Minstrel.

The rain continued at intervals throughout the day, but as the afternoon
wore on the skies looked a trifle more hopeful. It would be 'saft,' no
doubt, climbing the Law, but the bonfire must be lighted. Would Pettybaw
be behind London? Would Pettybaw desert the Queen in her hour of need?
Not though the rain were bursting the well-heads on Cawda; not though
the swollen mountain burns drowned us to the knee!