"Right! for every soldier--more especially a Scottish soldier--should be their brother, as he is mine, when off the battle-field. The girls are warm-hearted, for they have been reared, not in courts and cities, among the parasites of kings and slaves of fashion; but in camps and garrisons, among frank soldiers and generous hearts--the gallant Austrians and daring Croats; and all they inherit of old Scotland comes from me. I have been twice married, my dear boy. The mother of Ernestine was a Spanish lady of Flanders; the mother of Gabrielle, as you may see by her blooming cheek and fair hair, was of Hainault--'Hainault the Valiant!' hence the name of Gabrielle. They are two pretty pets; I love my dear girls, but think, at times, I would rather they had been boys, that they might have fought for the Catholic faith, and transmitted my hard-won title to posterity. At other times," continued the count, who seemed in high spirits and in a talking humour; "I am seized with sore longings to see old Scotland again--to see my father's tower, the blue waters, the purple mountains, and the pine-woods of my native place. But I was a younger son. I have made me a new name, a new fame, and patrimony of my own; I have hewn them out by my sword, and fenced them round by gallant deeds. I will never again have to enact the sorner or the trencherman at the hall-table of a kinsman, or stoop to eat a vassal's bread, though given by an elder brother, when here I am lord of three manors, Carlstein, Geizar, and Kœningratz, and camp-master of horse, under the Emperor. Yet my heart bled yesterday at the slaughter of my poor countrymen! Would to God they came crowding to the banners of Ferdinand, as they now crowd in tens of thousands to those of Gustavus Adolphus and his rival, King Christian; of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and that prince of cowards, Frederick Guelph, the Elector-Palatine. Then, indeed, the northern war would end without a blow." "Yet all your sympathy did not save our poor wounded men from massacre at Boitzenburg." "Tilly's orders were most stringent--to put all to the sword who resisted, that a terror might be stricken into others, and the Elbe abandoned. You do not know Tilly; his orders never bear but one construction. We knew quite well that Dunbar had but five hundred Highlanders in yonder sconce. We will never lack for information while that sharp fellow Bandolo lives." "Bandolo!" I repeated, thinking of Prudentia, the dancer, and endeavouring to recollect something else; "I have surely heard that name before." "Thus I was ordered at all risks to force the bridge of Boitzenburg, because it was your weakest point, and strengthened only by your sconce, mounted by twenty guns, which Bandolo undertook to have spiked the night before." "That sconce was an effort of poor Learmonth's skill; but has there been any fighting elsewhere?"