The essence of all human melancholy is in the sentiment of farewells. There are people roving about the world, to-day here, to-morrow afar, who cheat fate and avoid the most poignant wrench of this common experience by letting no root of their affection strike into a home or a heart Self-contained, aloof, unloved, and unloving, they make their campaign through life in movable tents that they strike as gaily as they pitch, and, beholding them thus evade the one touch of sorrow that is most inevitable and bitter to every sensitive soul, I have sometimes felt an envy of their fortune. To me the world was almost mirthful if its good-byes came less frequent. Cold and heat, the contumely of the slanderer, the insult of the tyrant, the agues and fevers of the flesh, the upheavals of personal fortune, were events a robust man might face with calm valiancy if he could be spared the cheering influence of the homely scene or the unchanged presence of his familiars and friends. I have sat in companies and put on an affected mirth, and laughed and sung with the most buoyant of all around, and yet ever and anon I chilled at the intruding notion of life’s brevity. Thus my leaving town Inneraora--its frozen hearths, its smokeless vents, its desecrated doorways, and the few of my friends who were back to it--was a stupendous grief. My father and my kinspeople were safe--we had heard of them by the returners from Lennox; but a girl with dark tresses gave me a closer passion for my native burgh than ever I felt for the same before. If love of his lady had been Argile’s reason for retreat (thought I), there was no great mystery in his act. What enhanced my trouble was that Clan MacLachlan--as Catholics always safe to a degree from the meddling of the invaders--had re-established themselves some weeks before in their own territory down the loch, and that young Lachlan, as his father’s proxy, was already manifesting a guardian’s interest in his cousin. The fact came to my knowledge in a way rather odd, but characteristic of John Splendid’s anxiety to save his friends the faintest breeze of ill-tidings. We were up early betimes in the morning of our departure for Lorn, though our march was fixed for the afternoon, as we had to await the arrival of some officers from Ceanntyre; and John and I, preparing our accoutrements, began to talk of the business that lay heaviest at my heart--the leaving of the girl we had found in Strongara wood. “The oddest thing that ever happened to me,” he said, after a while, “is that in the matter of this child she mothers so finely she should be under the delusion that I have the closest of all interests in its paternity. Did you catch her meaning when she spoke of its antecedents as we sat, the four of us, behind the fir-roots?” “No, I can’t say that I did,” said I, wonderingly.