er hand was to depreciate their
importance. He would take the most weighty and portentous with an air of
contempt.

"What's this, Miss Maclean?" he would say impatiently with the
snuff-pinch suspended between his pocket and his nose. "A king's letter.
Confound the man! what can he be wanting now?" Then with a careless
forefinger he would break the seal and turn the paper outside in,
heedless (to all appearance) as if it were an old copy of the _Courier_.

One day such a letter sent his face flaming as he returned to the
breakfast table. He looked at Miss Mary, sitting subdued behind her urn
and Gilian at her side, and then at his brothers, hardly yet awake
in the early morning, whose breakfasts in that small-windowed room it
needed two or three candles to illuminate.

"The county corps is coming south this way," said he, with a great
restraint upon his feelings.

Cornal Colin turned on him a lustreless eye.

"What havers are you on now, John?" said he, with no pause in the
supping of his porridge. Dugald paid no heed. With a hand a little
palsied he buttered a scone, and his lower lip was dropped and his eyes
were vacant, showing him far absent in the spirit. Conversation was
never very rife at the Paymaster's breakfast table.

"I'm telling you the county corps is coming south," said Mars, with what
for him to the field officer was almost testiness. "Here's a command for
billeting three hundred men on Friday night on their way to Dumbarton."

Up stood the Cornal with a face transfigured. He stretched across the
table and almost rudely clutched the paper from his brother's hand, cast
a fast glance at the contents and superscription, then sat again and
gave a little choked cheer, the hurrah of spent youth and joyfulness.
"Curse me! but it's true," he cried to the General. "The old 91st under
Crawford--Jiggy Crawford we called him for his dance in the ken at
Madrid before he exchanged--Friday, Friday; where's my uniform, Mary?
They'll be raw recruits, I'll warrant, not the old stuff, but--are you
hearing, Dugald? Oh! the Army, the Army! Let me see--yes, it says six
pipers and thirty band. My medals, Mary, are they in the shuttle of my
kist yet? The 91st--God! I wish it was our own; would I not show them!
You are not hearing a word I am saying, Dugald."

He paused in a feverish movement in his chair, thrust off from him
with a clatter of dishes and a spilling of milk the breakfast still
unfinished, and stared with