of Marnhoul, and on being
approached with due care, was found to bear the following mysterious
inscription--

"Sir Louis Maitland of Marnhoul, Bart., and Miss
Irma Sobieski Maitland receive every afternoon from
2 to 5."

Marnhoul, Galloway, June 21.

"Keep us a'!" was the universal exclamation of Eden Valley as it read
this solemnizing inscription. It was generally believed to be a
challenge to the lawyers and the powers in general to come at these
hours and turn the young people out.

And many were the opinions as to the legality of such a course. Law was
not generally understood in the Galloway of that date, and though the
Sheriff Substitute rode through the village once a month to spend a
night over the "cartes" with his friend the General, he too only laughed
and rode on. He was well known to me at the head of his profession, and
to have the ear of the Government. Such studied indifference, therefore,
could only be put down to a desire to wink at the proceedings of the
children, illegal and unprecedented as these might be.

But I must now say something about my own folk.

Though undoubtedly originally Highland, and, as my father averred, able
to claim kindred with the highest of his name, the MacAlpines had long
been domiciled in the south. My father was the son of a neighbouring
minister, and had only escaped the fate of succeeding his father in the
charge by a Highland aversion to taking the sacrament at the age when he
was called upon to do so--in order that, by the due order of the Church
of Scotland, he might be taken on his trials as a student in Divinity.
He had also, about that date, further complicated matters by marrying my
mother, Grace Lyon, the penniless daughter of a noted Cameronian elder
of the parish of Eden Valley.

In order to support her, and (after a little) _us_, John MacAlpine had
accepted a small school far up the glen, from which, after a year or
two, on the appointment of Dr. Forbes to the parish, he had followed his
old college friend to Eden Valley itself. Under his care the little
academy had gradually been organized on the newest and best scholastic
lines known to the time. Even for girls classics and mathematics played
a prominent part. Samplers and knitting, which had previously formed a
notable branch of the curriculum, were banished to an hour when little
Miss Huntingdon taught the girls, locked in her own department like
Wykliffites in danger of the fires