foundry lad who spoke, the very poet of the ironworks whose imagination ran in the ways of iron and steel, and who had attained for himself so incalculable a triumph--everything, and more than everything, that heart could desire--Rosmore, and its bonnie lady! His emotion touched his wife, not displeased--as what woman would be?--to feel herself the very crown of his acquisition; yet her heart went back all the more to poor Mary, whose arm he had probably held in the same way while he glowered with adoration at the white colonnade from the deck of this very steamboat (if steamboats live so long), and who had said, “Toots, Jims, what nonsense!” with her Glasgow accent, thinking that in that particular her husband, who was so clever and soon might rise to be foreman, was little better than a fool. After this ecstatic moment was over, they both fell into silence, a little anxious for the approaching meeting: he for what she would think of his children: she for what the children would turn out to be. She had begun to doubt a little whether the son would be an unkempt lad in a kilt, like the nephew with whom Mrs. Reuben Butler, once of that same parish, had made disastrous acquaintance. The shabby young men about Glasgow and Greenock had not been of the kind of the Whistler, as indeed, on second thoughts, her reason convinced her Archie was not the least likely to be: nor would Marion probably have the red hair and the short tartan frock, which had been her first idea of what was the probable appearance of the girl with whom Rowland had been so much disappointed. The sight in the distance of a white and a dark speck on the Rosmore pier, as the boat crossed the shining loch, brought Rowland’s heart to his mouth and made him almost incapable of speech. “Yon will be them,” he said with a parched mouth, gripping her arm. And Evelyn did not feel disposed to say anything, or to remark upon the beauty of the hills, though they lighted up in all their purple hollows, and threw out all their blue peaks, as if to catch her attention. Nature has a wonderful charm, if there is not some human emotion before her to pre-occupy both heart and eye. The range of mountains at the head of the loch were after all not of half so much importance as the little white figure on the pier head, of which scarcely the first fact of its existence was as yet perceptible, or the taller one that already seemed to sway and lounge with idle limbs beside her. Evelyn kept her eyes fixed upon them as she drew nearer and nearer, and gradually a feeling of relief stole into her heart. There was nothing so very alarming that James should have made such a fuss! “My dear James,” she said turning to him, “I suppose you did it for a joke: your Marion is a dear little girl.” He pressed her arm close, but he could not say anything: his middle-aged heart was beating. “Archie I must study more at leisure, but he looks very nice too,” she added with more of an effort. Perhaps,