I can end these pages with no more fitting sentiment. As a tribute of grateful recollection to those who made my days at Slains a happiness to me, and in the first fresh sorrow of a deep bereavement offered me distractions the more alluring because the more associated with Nature's changeless, silent grandeur, I pen these lines, crowning them with the homely Scottish wish that wherever they are and whatever they do, "Guid speed the wark!" LADY BLANCHE MURPHY. [Footnote A: There is another version of her courtship, and this a metrical one. This old ballad was not much known beyond the district round Slains, and the old servants and farmers on the estate were the chief depositaries of the tradition. I have failed to secure more than a very small fragment of it, which is itself only written down from memory by one of these old women. The rhyme and rhythm are both _original_: Lady Mary Hay went to a wedding Near the famous town of Reading: There a gentleman she saw That belonged to the law.... Here evidently there occurs a hiatus, during which some account is probably begun of her unreturned attachment, for a little later we find in the very primitive manuscript from which we quote these words of the countess: I that have so many slighted, I am at last--(unrequited?) The story is now carried on in prose (my informant having forgotten the text of the ballad), and says that "Lady Mary wanted or challenged him to meet her in a masquerade" (probably meaning a duel in disguise), "and that his father told him to go." Neither father nor son seems to have known the fair challenger's rank, though the following words point to their being aware of her sex, for the elder Falconer is represented as saying, If she is rich she will raise your fame, And if poor you are the same. ] OUR HOME IN THE TYROL CHAPTER III. We were soon comfortably settled in the old Hof. The spacious rooms, always deliciously cool, were fragrant with rare and delicate blossoms--Alpine roses from the rocks, white lilies from Moidel's special little garden-plot, grasses and nodding flowers, campanulas, veronicas, melisot, potentillas and lady's bedstraw, which, according to Anton, no cattle would touch, whilst the roots of others were good for man or beast, their various qualities being all known to him. But soon the waving flowers bent beneath the scythe. It was the eve of St. Peter and St. Paul's Day, a festival when all work must cease, and the Hofbauer, whose word was law, had given orders that the hay in the wood-meadow must be carried that evening. Seeing, therefore, that the more hands there were the better, the two Margarets seized each a rake and worked as hard as any woman in the field.