"You do return me back on memory's path To dear remembered scenes. Old Scotland's scenes! It is a glorious land! I long to roam, Doubly a lover, 'mong its wildest charms; Its glens, its rocky coast, its towering cliffs Come o'er me like a dream of infancy, Startling the soul to momentary rapture; It is the voice of home!"--DANIEL. Two or three days passed before Quentin quite recovered his equanimity, or felt assured of his safety, and then as the whole affair of the court-martial seemed like a night-mare, he might have deemed it all a dream, but for the occasional comments and congratulations of his friends, and for the splendid gift of Madame de Ribeaupierre, which he prized greatly for its whole history, and which he longed greatly to place on one of Flora Warrender's tiny fingers. Three days after the sitting of the court, tidings came to Alva that Baltasar de Saldos and his guerilla force had suffered a sharp repulse with great loss by the French, whose post at Fonteveras they had attacked with unexampled fury and blind rashness--both perhaps inspired by Donna Isidora's defection from her country's cause--and that in the confused retreat upon Hope's picquets, the luckless Baltasar had been shot dead by one of the Westphalian Light Horse. We are not ashamed to say that Quentin on hearing this from Major Middleton, felt a species of relief, self-preservation being one of the first laws of nature, and he never could have felt himself perfectly safe in Spain while Baltasar de Saldos trod its soil. Reflection on all the past served but to embitter the disgust and wrath with which he viewed the bearing of Cosmo Crawford at the recent trial, his whole connexion with it, and the terrible and hopeless malevolence he exhibited in reference to the episode at Kilhenzie, an affair which there was some difficulty in explaining, without referring to other and irrelevant matters; so Quentin burned with impatient eagerness for a general engagement with the French, for anything that would serve to blot out the recollection of his late unmerited humiliation; but he never thought of the enemy now without the face, figure, and voice of his friend Ribeaupierre rising upbraidingly before him. Cosmo could have dismissed Quentin from the regiment, with or without cause, a colonel being himself sole judge of the expediency of so getting rid of a volunteer; but he was ashamed that his own family should hear of an act so petty. The onus of the futile court-martial fell on the general of division, and there were many chances against Quentin ever relating its secret history at Rohallion, as ere long bullets would be flying thick as winter hail.