dy he had splendid health, in his heart a great
courage, and in his soul an ever-throbbing love. It was his love to
the very image of man, that made the horror of the treatment he had
received. Angus was and was not a man! After all, Gibbie was still
one to be regarded with holy envy.

Poor Ginny was sent to bed for interfering with her father's orders;
and what with rage and horror and pity, an inexplicable feeling of
hopelessness took possession of her, while her affection for her
father was greatly, perhaps for this world irretrievably, injured by
that morning's experience; a something remained that never passed
from her, and that something, as often as it stirred, rose between
him and her.

Fergus told his aunt what had taken place, and made much game of her
brownie. But the more Jean thought about the affair, the less she
liked it. It was she upon whom it all came! What did it matter who
or what her brownie was? And what had they whipped the creature
for? What harm had he done? If indeed he was a little ragged
urchin, the thing was only the more inexplicable! He had taken
nothing! She had never missed so much as a barley scon! The cream
had always brought her the right quantity of butter! Not even a
bannock, so far as she knew, was ever gone from the press, or an egg
from the bossie where they lay heaped! There was more in it than
she could understand! Her nephew's mighty feat, so far from
explaining anything, had only sealed up the mystery. She could not
help cherishing a shadowy hope that, when things had grown quiet, he
would again reveal his presence by his work, if not by his visible
person. It was mortifying to think that he had gone as he came, and
she had never set eyes upon him. But Fergus's account of his
disappearance had also, in her judgment, a decided element of the
marvellous in it. She was strongly inclined to believe that the
brownie had cast a glamour over him and the laird and Angus, all
three, and had been making game of them for his own amusement.
Indeed Daurside generally refused the explanation of the brownie
presented for its acceptance, and the laird scored nothing against
the arch-enemy Superstition.

Donal Grant, missing his "cratur" that day for the first time, heard
enough when he came home to satisfy him that he had been acting the
brownie in the house and the stable as well as in the field,
incredible as it might well appear that such a child should have had
ev