THE following evening was signalised in the quiet house of Mr. Buchanan, by such a discussion as never before startled its respectable echoes. Cuthbert Charteris, lawless as Ishmael, lifted his hand against every man, and refused to confess himself worsted, though George Buchanan and Sons, as a firm, and as individuals, not to speak of Adam Smith, and the law of supply and demand, were set in battle array against him. The subject of controversy was one which would have made the blood boil with indignation and wrath in the veins of Harry Muir, being nothing less, indeed, for a starting-point, than his salary, which the advocate, looking on the matter in a theoretical point of view, and not admitting into his consideration the “everybody-else” whose practice had so large a share in forming the opinions of his cousins, condemned very strongly and clearly, to the great wrath of Richard and Alick, and the half-convinced irritation of their father, as quite an unfair and inadequate remuneration for the full time and labours of an--at least partially--educated man. Cuthbert had not at all a commercial mind, and the natural right and justice continually overshadowed with him the laws of supply and demand. It was impossible to persuade him, that any law required of him a systematic wrong, nor that a man’s own personal conscience had nothing to do with his position as an employer of other men. Cuthbert would not be convinced--neither would Dick and Alick--and Mr. Buchanan himself, head of the firm and the house, took up his candle abruptly and went off, in some excitement, to his own apartment, there to sleep upon sundry propositions which had entered, like arrows, sharp and irritating, into a mind which would hear reason, whether its possessor chose or no. Cuthbert remained some weeks in Glasgow--he had little practice to neglect at home, and the western magnates made much of him, greatly esteeming in their hearts the metropolitan “rank” so very different from their own, which they affected to despise;--and the intercourse which he had with the Muirs, already bore a character of friendliness and confidence, such as not unusually elevates an acquaintance formed at some family crisis, into a warm and lasting friendship. But Charteris at length was going home, and, not without many jibes from his young cousins, about the strange attraction which drew him so often to visit the invalid, he set out from the office for the last time to see Harry Muir.