invite the public to enter and buy. Had it been possible for an
avalanche to fall like a thunderbolt from the heavens, they would have
supposed that one had fallen in the night, and overwhelmed the house.
Door and windows were invisible, buried with the rude pavement in front
beneath a mass of snow. Spades and shovels in boys' hands had been busy
for hours during the night, throwing it up against the house, the door
having first been blocked up with a huge ball, which they had rolled in
silence the whole length of the long street.

Bruce and his wife slept in a little room immediately behind the shop,
that they might watch over their treasures; and Bruce's first movement
in the morning was always into the shop to unbolt the door and take
down the shutters. His astonishment when he looked upon a blank wall of
snow may be imagined. He did not question that the whole town was
similarly overwhelmed. Such a snow-storm had never been heard of
before, and he thought with uneasy recollection of the oath he had
uttered in the school-room; imagining for a moment that the whole of
Glamerton lay overwhelmed by the divine wrath, because he had, under
the agony of a bite from his own dog, consigned her to a quarter where
dogs and children are not admitted. In his bewilderment, he called
aloud:

"Nancy! Robbie! Johnnie! We're a' beeriet alive!"

"Preserve's a', Robert! what's happent?" cried his wife, rushing from
the kitchen.

"I'm no beeriet, that I ken o'," cried Robert the younger, entering
from the yard.

His father rushed to the back-door, and, to his astonishment and
relief, saw the whole world about him. It was a private judgment, then,
upon him and his shop. And so it was--a very private judgment. Probably
it was the result of his meditations upon it, that he never after
carried complaints to Murdoch Malison.

Alec Forbes had nothing to do with this revenge. But Bruce always
thought he was at the bottom of it, and hated him the more. He disliked
all _loons_ but his own; for was not the spirit of _loons_ the very
antipodes to that of money-making? But Alec Forbes he hated, for he was
the very antipode to Robert Bruce himself. Mrs Bruce always followed
her husband's lead, being capable only of two devotions--the one to her
husband and children, the other to the shop.--Of Annie they highly and
righteously disapproved, partly because they had to feed her, and
partly because she was friendly with Alec. This disapproval ros