onally rough man for his position,
but for any position in the Scotland of that age. No doubt he was
regarded as a madman, and used as a madman; but my opinion is the more
philosophical--that, by an arrest of development, into the middle of
the ladies and gentlemen of the family came a veritable savage, and one
out of no darkest age of history, but from beyond all record--out of
the awful prehistoric times."

His lordship visibly and involuntarily shuddered, as at the memory of
something he had seen: into that region he had probably wandered in his
visions.

"He was a fierce and furious savage--worse than anything you can
imagine. The only sign of any influence of civilization upon him was
that he was cowed by the eye of his keeper. Never, except by rarest
chance, was he left alone and awake: no one could tell what he might
not do!

"He was of gigantic size, with coarse black hair--the brawniest fellow
and the ugliest, they say--for you may suppose my description is but
legendary: there is no portrait of him on our walls!--with a huge,
shapeless, cruel, greedy mouth,"--

As his lordship said the words, Donal, with involuntary insight, saw
both cruelty and greed in the mouth that spoke, though it was neither
huge nor shapeless.

--"lips hideously red and large, with the whitest teeth inside them.--I
give you the description," said his lordship, who evidently lingered
not without pleasure on the details of his recital, "just as I used to
hear it from my old nurse, who had been all her life in the family, and
had it from her mother who was in it at the time.--His great passion,
his keenest delight, was animal food. He ate enormously--more, it was
said, than three hearty men. An hour after he had gorged himself, he
was ready to gorge again. Roast meat was his main delight, but he was
fond of broth also.--He must have been more like Mrs. Shelley's
creation in Frankenstein than any other. All the time I read that
story, I had the vision of my far-off cousin constantly before me, as I
saw him in my mind's eye when my nurse described him; and often I
wondered whether Mrs. Shelley could have heard of him.--In an earlier
age and more practical, they would have got rid of him by readier and
more thorough means, if only for shame of having brought such a being
into the world, but they sent him with his keeper, a little man with a
powerful eye, to that same house down in the town there: in an
altogether solitary place they co