"Ride your ways, Laird of Ellangowan! ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths--see if your own fire burn the blither for that. Ye have riven the roof off seven cottar houses--look if your own roof-tree stand the faster. Ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram! what do ye glower after our folk for? There's thirty hearts there that would have spent their life-blood ere ye had scratched your finger. Yes, there's thirty yonder, from the old wife of an hundred to the babe that was born last week, that ye have turned out o' their houses, to sleep with the black-cock in the moors! Ride your ways, Ellan- gowan! Our bairns are hanging at our weary backs; look that your braw cradle at home be the fairer spread up. Not that I am wishing ill to little Harry, God forbid! So ride your way, for these are the last words ye'll ever hear Meg Merrilies speak, and this is the last twig that I'll ever cut in the bonny woods of Ellangowan." And having uttered this dark and threatening speech, she turned contemptuously from him, to join her comrades in misfortune. Meanwhile, the smugglers under their captain, Dirck Hatteraick, had been carrying on their lawless trade as usual, and the Laird of Ellangowan was as determined to put them down as he had been to get rid of the gipsies. He was actively assisted in his endeavours against them by the same Frank Kennedy who had carried out the eviction of Meg Merrilies and her companions, and the smugglers had sworn to be revenged upon their enemy. On the day that young Harry Bertram was five years old, Dirck Hatteraick's ship was in the bay outside the village of Kippletringan. A sloop of war in the king's service was pursuing it in order to seize the smuggled goods which were on board, when Frank Kennedy, looking out, saw that Hatteraick was likely to escape, as he had got his vessel round a headland called Warroch Point, where it was concealed from the sloop, unless someone went down to the Point and made a signal to the pursuers. He accordingly mounted his horse and galloped off. On his way he happened to meet little Bertram, who was walking with the dominie, and as he had often promised to give the child a ride, he took him up on his nag, and rode off towards the Point. Shortly afterwards the discharges of several cannon were heard, and after an interval a still louder explosion, as of a vessel blown up. As evening came on, Mr. and Mrs. Bertram were expecting little Harry to come home, and as he did not return, became very uneasy about him. After waiting for him in anxiety for some time, the news came in that Kennedy's horse had come back riderless to its stable.