no great distance. The captain sent me in the direction of
the sound, bidding me, if the child should be a male Macdonald, to kill
it forthwith; if a girl, to spare. I soon came up to the place whence
the sound proceeded, and saw through the whirling snow, under the
protection of a jutting cliff, a nurse with a boy of four years old,
both of them wailing and shivering with cold. The child was gnawing a
bone and, near by, a dog was crouching. Pity wrung my heart. I drove my
bayonet through the trembling cur, and, going back to the captain,
showed him the bloody steel as a proof that I had obeyed his commands."

The innkeeper, who had been all ears, said: "You, then, were that
soldier?" "I was, indeed," replied the old wanderer. "_And I was that
child!_" said the landlord, "and _your_ life is saved. My sons stand at
the threshold of the inn, ready to fall upon you when you leave. I
countermand the order for your destruction. Here you shall stay, an
honoured guest, till the end of your days, as a recompense for saving my
life on that awful night."

The story goes on to state that the foot-weary Campbell lived for some
years a pensioner in Port-na-croish inn, and was buried at the expense
of the grateful innkeeper. I do not know any story that comes nearer
perfection.

NOTES ON THE TROSSACHS.

The Rev. Mr. Wilson, the cultured and genial minister of the Trossachs,
has recently published a most readable little book on the district he
knows so well. Perhaps no district indeed on the world's surface is so
well known (even to those who have never seen it), as the Trossachs.
Little did Sir Walter suspect, when he penned the stirring iambics of
_The Lady of the Lake_, that he was furnishing materials to the
pedagogue which would be parsed, analysed, and dissected by myriads of
pupils in all the schools of the British Empire. We shall all carry with
us to the grave the leading passages of that romantic lay: the
stag-hunt, the duel at Coilantogle Ford, the whistle that garrisoned the
glen, and the episode of the Fiery Cross. Such lines, we may say, have
gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world.
Happening to pass Strathyre station in July, 1907, I was requested by a
bright-eyed little Japanese gentleman in the compartment to tell him
where we were. On being informed, he (after casting an eye of pity on
the deplorable stork that is supposed to decorate the drinking-fountain
of the station), began