ar. However, I will endure him, since you think it proper."

The Captain was accordingly graciously requested by Lady Staunton to
remain during dinner. During this visit his studious and punctilious
complaisance towards the lady of rank was happily contrasted by the
cavalier air of civil familiarity in which he indulged towards the
minister's wife.

"I have not been able to persuade Mrs. Butler," said Lady Staunton to the
Captain, during the interval when Jeanie had left the parlour, "to let me
talk of making any recompense for storming her house, and garrisoning it
in the way I have done."

"Doubtless, matam," said the Captain, "it wad ill pecome Mrs. Putler, wha
is a very decent pody, to make any such sharge to a lady who comes from
my house, or his Grace's, which is the same thing.--And speaking of
garrisons, in the year forty-five, I was poot with a garrison of twenty
of my lads in the house of Inver-Garry, whilk had near been unhappily,
for--"

"I beg your pardon, sir--But I wish I could think of some way of
indemnifying this good lady."

"O, no need of intemnifying at all--no trouble for her, nothing at all--
So, peing in the house of Inver-Garry, and the people about it being
uncanny, I doubted the warst, and--"

"Do you happen to know, sir," said Lady Staunton, "if any of these two
lads, these young Butlers, I mean, show any turn for the army?"

"Could not say, indeed, my leddy," replied Knockdunder--"So, I knowing
the people to pe unchancy, and not to lippen to, and hearing a pibroch in
the wood, I pegan to pid my lads look to their flints, and then--"

"For," said Lady Staunton, with the most ruthless disregard to the
narrative which she mangled by these interruptions, "if that should be
the case, it should cost Sir George but the asking a pair of colours for
one of them at the War-Office, since we have always supported Government,
and never had occasion to trouble ministers."

"And if you please, my leddy," said Duncan, who began to find some savour
in this proposal, "as I hae a braw weel-grown lad of a nevoy, ca'd Duncan
MacGilligan, that is as pig as paith the Putler pairns putten thegither,
Sir George could ask a pair for him at the same time, and it wad pe put
ae asking for a'."

Lady Staunton only answered this hint with a well-bred stare, which gave
no sort of encouragement.

Jeanie, who now returned, was lost in amazement at the wonderful
difference betwixt the helpless and despairing girl