a lease of Dalness house as long as we like to stay
in it, its pendicles and pertinents, lofts, crofts, gardens, mills,
multures, and sequels, as the lawyers say in their damned sheep-skins,
that have been the curse of the Highlands even more than books have
been. Now I've had an adventure like this before. Once in Regenwalde,
between Danzig and Stettin, where we lay for two months, I spent a night
with a company of Hepburn's blades in a castle abandoned by a cousin
of the Duke of Pomerania. Roystering dogs! Stout hearts! Where are they
now, those fine lads in corslet and morgensterne, who played havoc with
the casks in the Regenwalde cellar? Some of them died of the pest in
Schiefelbein, four of them fell under old Jock Hepburn at Frankfort, the
lave went wandering about the world, kissing and drinking, no doubt, and
lying and sorrowing and dying, and never again will we foregather in a
vacant house in foreign parts! For that is the hardship of life, that
it's ever a flux and change. We are here to-day and away to-morrow, and
the bigger the company and the more high-hearted the merriment, the
less likely is the experience to be repeated. I'm sitting here in a
miraculous dwelling in the land of Lorn, and I have but to shut my eyes
and round about me are cavaliers of fortune at the board. I give you
the old word, Elrigmore: 'Claymore and the Gael '; for the rest--pardon
me--you gentlemen are out of the ploy. I shut my eyes and I see
Fowlis and Farquhar, Mackenzie, Obisdell, Ross, the two _balbiren_ and
_stabknechten_ with their legs about the board; the wind's howling up
from Stettin road; to-morrow we may be carrion in the ditch at Guben's
Gate, or wounded to a death by slow degrees in night scaladoe. That
was soldiering. You fought your equals with art and science; here's----
Well, well, God's grace for MacCailein Mor!"

"God's grace for us all!" said the minister.

The man with the want fell fast asleep in his chair, with his limbs
in gawky disposition. Stewart's bullet-head, with the line of the oval
unbroken by ears, bobbed with affected eagerness to keep up with the
fast English utterance and the foreign names of M'Iver, while all the
time he was fingering some metal spoons and wondering if money was in
them and if they could be safely got to Inneraora. Sonachan and the
baron-bailie dipped their beaks in the jugs, and with lifted heads, as
fowls slocken their thirst, they let the wine slip slowly down their
throa