In that timeworn fane, Row, the Covenanter, had preached, and the great archbishop, too—Sharpe, the recreant, or the martyr (which you will), who died on Magus Muir; and, that the marvellous may not be wanting, there is a legend which tells us that, in the year before the Covenanters invaded England, and stormed Newcastle, thereby seriously injuring the London coal market, there used to issue from the empty loft where, in old Catholic times, the organ stood, the sound of such an instrument in full play, together with the voices of the choristers singing a grand old Gregorian chant. These sounds were only heard in the night, or at other times when Calderwood kirk was empty, for the moment any one entered they ceased, and all became still—still as the dead Calderwoods of the Glen and of Piteadie, stretched in effigy, each upon his pedestal of stone, in St. Margaret’s aisle; but this marvel was universally believed to portend the ultimate return of prelacy. So rapidly and totally does the speed of the railway annihilate alike the extent of time and space, that it seemed difficult to embody the fact that, but four-and-twenty hours ago, I had been in my quarters at Maidstone barracks, or amid the splendour of a fashionable hotel in London; and yet it was so. Treading deep among the last year’s crisp and withered leaves, I proceeded down the sombre and winding avenue, with a heart that beat quicker as I drew near a man, whose figure I remembered instantly, for he was my early friend, my second father, my maternal uncle, good old Sir Nigel Calderwood. Occupied with a weeder, which he always carried, and with which the ends of all his walking-sticks were furnished, he was intent on up-rooting some obnoxious weed; thus I could approach him unobserved. He seemed as stout and hale as when I saw him last. The grey hair, that was wont to escape under his well-worn wide-awake, was thinner and more silvery, perhaps; but the old hat had its usual row of flies and fishhooks, and his face was as ruddy as ever, and spoke of high health and spirits. He stooped a little more, certainly; but his figure was still sturdy, and clad, as usual, in a rough suit of grey tweed, with his stout legs encased in long brown leather leggings, that had seen much service in their time among the turnips and heather in the shooting season, and in the trouting streams that traverse the fertile Howe of Fife. An old, half-blind, and wheezing otter terrier crept close to his heels as I came up. With a polite bow the worthy baronet surveyed, but failed to recognise me, and waited, with a glance of inquiry, until I should speak; for, sooth to say, in the tall, rather well-knit figure, bronzed face, and heavy moustaches I exhibited, he could scarcely be expected to recognise the slender and beardless lad, whose heart was so heavy when he was conveyed away from his mother’s arms, to push his way in the world as a cornet of cavalry some six years before.