"He had been in the foreign brigades, the Scottish and Irish," replied the lady. "One of these letters is from Monsieur the Comte d'Artois, and it praises the courage of the Scottish Captain Kennedy, of the Regiment de Berwick, in the campaigns upon the Meuse and Rhine. The other letter is from his poor wife, and is subscribed Josephine. Ah me, how sad! the name that is on the ring." They spoke in low tones, as if loth to disturb the child, who was still playing with the terrier. "What says it, my lady?" asked the dominie, "for though well versed in the dead languages, praised be Providence and the auld pedagogy of Glasgow, I know little of the living--French especially, the language of Voltaire, Diderot, and Helvetius--of democrats, levellers, revolutionists, and the slaves of the Corsican tyrant." "The letter has no date, dominie," replied the lady, smiling at this outburst; "the cover also is wanting, but it runs thus." Standing one on each side of her chair, each with a hand at his ear to listen, the two old men heard her translate with ease the following letter: "MY OWN DEAR, DEAR QUENTIN,-- "This is the last letter you will receive in France from your own Fifine. The next I shall address to you, as you may direct, to Scotland. Ah, mon Dieu! how sad--how terrible to think that we are to be separated, and at such a time! But madame my mother's illness pleads for me with all, and more than all with you, Quentin. You, as a Scotsman and royalist officer, and our poor child, for the very blood it inherits from his mother, would be welcome victims to the shambles of the great Republic; for the first Consul B. and Citizen M. his secretary of state, would not spare even a child at this crisis, lest it should grow into an aristocrat and an enemy.* Every hour the hatred of Britain grows stronger here, and the mode in which we treat the prisoners taken in Flanders and elsewhere, makes my blood alternately glow and freeze, Frenchwoman though I am! But I have not forgotten the Place de la Grève, or the horrors of that day, when my father's blood moistened the sawdust of a scaffold, just wetted by the blood of Marie Antoinette. * The initials no doubt refer to Bonaparte and the secretary Hugues Bernard Maret, who assisted so vigorously in the 18th Brumaire. "Enough of this, however, dear Quentin; 'tis safer to speak than to write of such things, though this letter goes by a safe and sure hand, our dear friend, the Abbé Lebrun, for in this land of spies the post is perilous. Destroy it, however, the moment you receive it, for we know not what mischief it might do us all, though the ship by which you sail, goes, you say, under cartel, and by the rules of war can neither be attacked nor taken.