ng the most of the produce of their cows.

Effie, his youngest daughter, under the tend guileless purity of
thought, speech, and action, as by her uncommon loveliness of person.
The news that this girl was in prison on suspicion of the murder of her
child was what kept Reuben Butler lingering on the hills outside
Edinburgh, until a fitting time should arrive to wait upon Jeannie and
her father. Effie denied all guilt of infanticide; but she had concealed
the birth of a child, and the child had disappeared, so that by the law
she was judged guilty.

His limbs exhausted with fatigue, Butler dragged himself up to St.
Leonard's crags, and presented himself at the door of Deans' habitation,
with feelings much akin to the miserable fears of its inhabitants.

"Come in," answered the low, sweet-toned voice he loved best to hear, as
he tapped at the door. The old man was seated by the fire with his
well-worn pocket Bible in his hands, and turned his face away as Butler
entered and clasped the extended hand which had supported his orphan
infancy, wept over it, and in vain endeavoured to say more than "God
comfort you! God comfort you!"

"He will--He doth, my friend," said Deans. "He doth now, and He will yet
more in His own gude time. I have been ower proud of my sufferings in a
gude cause, Reuben, and now I am to be tried with those whilk will turn
my pride and glory into a reproach and a hissing."

Butler had too much humanity to do anything but encourage the good old
man as he reckoned up with conscious pride the constancy of his
testimony and his sufferings, but seized the opportunity as soon as
possible of some private conversation with Jeannie. He gave her the
message he had received from a stranger he had met an hour or two
before, to the effect that she must meet him that night alone at
Muschat's cairn at moonrise.

"Tell him," said Jeannie hastily, "I will certainly come"; and to all
Butler's entreaties and expostulations would give no explanation. They
were recalled--"ben the house," to use the language of the country--by
the loud tones of David Deans, and found the poor old man half frantic
between grief and zealous ire against proposals to employ a lawyer on
Effie's behalf, they being, all, in his opinion, carnal, crafty
self-seekers.

But when the poor old man, fatigued with the arguments and presence of
his guests, retired to his sleeping apartment, the Laird of Dumbiedikes
said he would employ his own man o