hing occurs
giving to his possible an occasion to embody itself in the actual, he
may live honoured, and die respected. There is always, not the less,
the danger of his real nature, or rather unnature, breaking out in this
way or that diabolical.

Although he went so little out of the house, and apparently never
beyond the grounds, he yet learned a good deal at times of things going
on in the neighbourhood: Davie brought him news; so did Simmons; and
now and then he would have an interview with his half acknowledged
relative, the factor.

One morning before he was up, he sent for Donal, and requested him to
give Davie a half-holiday, and do something for him instead.

"You know, or perhaps you don't know, that I have a house in the town,"
he said, "--the only house, indeed, now belonging to the earldom--a not
very attractive house which you must have seen--on the main street, a
little before you come to the Morven Arms."

"I believe I know the house, my lord," answered Donal, "with strong
iron stanchions to the lower windows, and--?"

"Yes, that is the house; and I daresay you have heard the story of
it--I mean how it fell into its present disgrace! The thing happened
more than a hundred years ago. But I have spent some nights in it
myself notwithstanding."

"I should like to hear it, my lord," said Donal.

"You may as well have it from myself as from another! It does not touch
any of us, for the family was not then represented by the same branch
as now; I might else be thin-skinned about it. No mere legend, mind
you, but a very dreadful fact, which resulted in the abandonment of the
house! I think it time, for my part, that it should be forgotten and
the house let. It was before the castle and the title parted company:
that is a tale worth telling too! there was little fair play in either!
but I will not trouble you with it now.

"Into the generation then above ground," the earl began, assuming a
book-tone the instant he began to narrate, "by one of those freaks of
nature specially strange and more inexplicable than the rest, had been
born an original savage. You know that the old type, after so many
modifications have been wrought upon it, will sometimes reappear in its
ancient crudity amidst the latest development of the race, animal and
vegetable too, I suppose!--well, so it was now: I use no figure of
speech when I say that the apparition, the phenomenon, was a savage. I
do not mean that he was an excepti