They had a fine day, and the party was very successful. Doris had carried out her idea about the music on the opposite bank, and it was very effective. The guests took up this phrase from the sisters, who asked, “Was it not very effective?” with ingenuous delight in their own success. It was no common band from the neighbourhood, nor even a party of wandering Germans, but a carefully selected company of minstrels brought from London at an enormous cost: and while half the county walked about upon the tolerably dry lawn, or inspected the house and all the new and elegant articles of art-furniture which the Diroms had brought, the trembling melody of the violins quivered through the air, and the wind instruments sighed and shouted through all the echoes of the Dene. The whole scene was highly effective, and all the actors in it looking and smiling their best. The Marquis kindly paid Mr. Dirom a compliment on his “splendid hospitality,” and the eloquent Americans who made pilgrimages to Adam Fleming’s grave, and repeated tenderly his adjuration to “Helen fair, beyond compare,” regarded everything, except Mr. Dirom in his white waistcoat, with that mixture of veneration and condescension which inspires the transatlantic bosom amid the immemorial scenery of old England. “Don’t you feel the spell coming over you, don’t you feel the mosses growing?” they cried. “See, this is English dust and damp--the ethereal mould which comes over your very hands, as dear John Burroughs says. Presently, if you don’t wash ’em, little plants will begin to grow all along your line of life. Wonderful English country--mother of the ages!” This was what the American guests said to each other. It was the Miss Dempsters, to whom Americans were as the South Sea Islanders, and who were anxious to observe the customs and manners of the unknown race, before whom these poetical exclamations were made. “The English country may be wonderful, though I know very little about it; but you are forgetting it is not here,” Miss Dempster said. “This is Scotland; maybe you may never have heard the name before.” It is needless to say that the ladies and gentlemen from across the Atlantic smiled at the old native woman’s mistake. “Oh yes, we know Scotland very well,--almost best of all,--for has not everybody read the Waverleys?--at least all our fathers and mothers read them, though they may be a little out of date in our day.” “You must be clever indeed if Walter Scott is not clever enough for you,” said the old lady grimly. “But here’s just one thing that a foolish person like me, it seems, can correct you in, and that’s that this countryside is not England. No, nor ever was; and Adam Fleeming in his grave yonder could have told you that.” “Was he a Border chief? was he one of the knights in Branksome Hall? We know all about that. And to think you should be of the same race, and have lived here always, and known the story, and sung the song all your life!”