No, Hugh John, for once your military genius has been at fault. For at the very moment when the snowy walls were being scaled, Sweetheart suddenly lifted her feet from the ground. The swing, pushed back to the limit of its chains, glided smoothly forward. One solidly shod boot-sole took Hugh John full on the chest. Another "plunked" Sir Toady in a locality which he held yet more tender, especially, as now, before dinner. Both warriors shot backward as if discharged from a petard, disappearing from view down the slope into the big drifts at the foot. Maid Margaret, who had not been touched at all, but who had stood (as it were) in the very middle of affairs, uttered one terrified yell and bolted. "Time!" cried the umpire, appearing in the doorway. The baffled champions entered first. While changing, they had got ready at least twenty complete explanations of their downfall. Sweetheart, coming in a little late, sat down to her sewing, and listened placidly with a faint, sweet, far-away smile which seemed to say that knitting, though an occupation despised by boys, does not wholly obscure the intellect. But she did not say a word. Her brothers somehow found this attitude excessively provoking. * * * * * Thus exercised in mind and body, and presently also fortified by the mid-day meal, the company declared its kind readiness to hear the rest of _The Antiquary_. It was not _Rob Roy_, of course--but a snowy day brought with it certain compensations. So to the crackle of the wood fire and the click and shift of the knitting needles, I began the final tale from _The Antiquary_. THE THIRD TALE FROM "THE ANTIQUARY" I. THE EARL'S SECRET ON the seashore not far from the mansion-house of Monkbarns stood the little fisherman's cottage of Saunders Mucklebackit. Saunders it was who had rigged the mast, by which Sir Arthur and his daughter were pulled to the top of the cliffs on the night of the storm. His wife came every day to the door of Monkbarns to sell fish to Miss Griselda, the Antiquary's sister, when the pair of them would stand by the hour "skirling and flyting beneath his window like so many seamaws," as Oldbuck himself said. Besides Steenie Mucklebackit, the eldest son, the same who had assisted Edie Ochiltree to bestow a well-deserved chastisement upon Dousterswivel, and a number of merry half-naked urchins, the family included the grandmother, Elspeth Mucklebackit--a woman old, but not infirm, whose understanding appeared at most times to be asleep, but the stony terror of whose countenance often frightened the bairns more than their mother's shrill tongue and ready palm.