y a
comfort: how was he to pass all the evenings of the week without the
preacher? On the other hand, if he accepted him, he might leave the
miserable cottage, and go to the manse: from a moral point of
view--that was, from the point of other people's judgment of him--it
would be of consequence to have a clergyman for a son-in-law.
Slowly he raised himself in his chair, opened his unsteady eyes,
which rolled and pitched like boats on a choppy sea, and said
solemnly,

"You have my permission, Mr. Duff."

The young preacher hastened to find Ginevra, but only to meet a
refusal, gentle and sorrowful. He pleaded for permission to repeat
his request after an interval, but she distinctly refused. She did
not, however, succeed in making a man with such a large opinion of
himself hopeless. Disappointed and annoyed he was, but he sought
and fancied he found reasons for her decision which were not
unfavourable to himself, and continued to visit her father as
before, saying to him he had not quite succeeded in drawing from her
a favourable answer, but hoped to prevail. He nowise acted the
despairing lover, but made grander sermons than ever, and, as he
came to feel at home in his pulpit, delivered them with growing
force. But delay wrought desire in the laird; and at length, one
evening, having by cross-questioning satisfied himself that Fergus
made no progress, he rose, and going to his desk, handed him Donal's
verses. Fergus read them, and remarked he had read better, but the
first stanza had a slight flavour of Shelley.

"I don't care a straw about their merit or demerit," said Mr.
Galbraith; "poetry is nothing but spoilt prose. What I want to know
is, whether they do not suggest a reason for your want of success
with Jenny. Do you know the writing?"

"I cannot say I do. But I think it is very likely that of Donal
Grant; he sets up for the Burns of Daurside."

"Insolent scoundrel!" cried the laird, bringing down his fist on the
table, and fluttering the wine glasses. "Next to superstition I hate
romance--with my whole heart I do!" And something like a flash of
cold moonlight on wintred water gleamed over, rather than shot from,
his poor focusless eyes.

"But, my dear sir," said Fergus, "if I am to understand these
lines--"

"Yes! if you are to understand where there is no sense whatever!"

"I think I understand them--if you will excuse me for venturing to
say so; and what I read in them is, that, whoe