'“I would wear it in my bosom, Lest my jewel I should tine.”' It is the crowning of my own life rather than that of the British Empire that engages my present thought. Will you intercede for me with Francesca's father?” “And this is the end of all your international bickering?” Salemina asked teasingly. “Yes,” he answered; “we have buried the hatchet, signed articles of agreement, made treaties of international comity. Francesca stays over here as a kind of missionary to Scotland, so she says, or as a feminine diplomat; she wishes to be on hand to enforce the Monroe Doctrine properly, in case her government's accredited ambassadors relax in the performance of their duty.” “Salemina!” called a laughing voice outside the door. “I am won'erful lifted up. You will be a prood woman the day, for I am now Estaiblished!” and Francesca, clad in Miss Grieve's Sunday bonnet, shawl, and black cotton gloves, entered, and curtsied demurely to the floor. She held, as corroborative detail, a life of John Knox in her hand, and anything more incongruous than her sparkling eyes and mutinous mouth under the melancholy head-gear can hardly be imagined. “I am now Estaiblished,” she repeated. “Div ye ken the new asseestant frae Inchcawdy pairish? I'm the mon' (a second deep curtsy here). “I trust, leddies, that ye'll mak' the maist o' your releegious preevileges, an' that ye'll be constant at the kurruk.--Have you given papa's consent, Salemina? And isn't it dreadful that he is Scotch?” “Isn't it dreadful that she is not?” asked Mr. Macdonald. “Yet to my mind no woman in Scotland is half as lovable as she!” “And no man in America begins to compare with him,” Francesca confessed sadly. “Isn't it pitiful that out of the millions of our own countrypeople we couldn't have found somebody that would do? What do you think now, Lord Ronald Macdonald, of these dangerous international alliances?” “You never understood that speech of mine,” he replied, with prompt mendacity. “When I said that international marriages presented more difficulties to the imagination than others, I was thinking of your marriage and mine, and that, I knew from the first moment I saw you, would be extremely difficult to arrange!” Chapter XXVI. 'Scotland's burning! Look out!' 'And soon a score of fires, I ween, From height, and hill, and cliff were seen; . . . . . . . Each after each they glanced to sight, As stars arise upon the night, They gleamed on many a dusky tarn, Haunted by the lonely earn; On many a cairn's grey pyramid, Where urns of mighty chiefs lie hid.' The Lay of the Last Minstrel.