reams! Surely some
ancestor of mine had wandered northwards from that gracious plain. On
one side of me, at least, I was sib to the vineyards and the chestnut
groves. For strange yearnings thrilled me as I beheld white-garlanded
cities strung across the plain, the blue lakes grey in the haze, like
eyes that look through tears.

Yet hitherto a hill-farm on the moors of Minnigaff had been my
abiding-place. There I had played with the collies and the grey rabbits.
There I had listened to the whaup and the peewits crying in the night;
and save the cold, grey, resonant spaces of Edinburgh, whither I had
gone to study, this was all my eyes had yet known. But when Giovanni
Turazza, exile from the city of Verona, paused in his reading of the
sonorous Italian to rebuke my Scots accent, and continued softly to give
me illustrations of the dialects of north and south, something moved
within me that sickened me to think of the Lombard plain sleeping in the
gracious sunshine--which I might never see.

Yet I saw it. I trod its ways and stood by its still waters. And already
they are become my life and my home.

Now, I who write am Stephen Douglas, of the moorland stock of the
northern Douglases--kin to Douglaswater, and on the wrong side of the
blanket to Drumdarroch himself. It has been the custom that one of the
Douglases should in every generation be sent to the college to rear for
the kirk.

For the hand of the Douglas has ever been kind to kin; and since
patronage came back--in law or out law, the Douglases have managed to
put their man into Drumdarroch parish and to have a Douglas in the white
manse by the Waterside. And so it is like to be when, as they say, the
rights of patron shall again pass away.

Now, I was in process or manufacture for this purpose, though
threatening to turn out somewhat over tardy in development to profit by
the act of patronage. But the Douglas dourness stood me in good stead,
as it has done all the Douglases that ever lived since the greatest of
the race charged to the death, with the point of his spear dropped low
and the heart of his lord thrown before him, among the Paynim hordes.

The lad to undertake whose tutelage I went abroad was a Fenwick of
Allerton in the Border country--the scion of a reputable stock, sometime
impoverished by gambling in the times of the Regent, and before that
with whistling "Owre the water to Charlie"; but now, by the opening-up
of the sea-coal pits, again gathe