"Does she really, noo? The dear lassie!" cried he, snapping his fingers, while his eyes glistened with delight; and he commenced a sort of strathspey round the table. "My ain bonnie blithesome Jessie! Mony a gloaming I have spent wi’ her among the sauch-tree woods o’ Inchavon, and the haughs o’ the Isla. Deil tak the wars and campaigning! How blithely would I gie this unco land o’ teuch beef and rotten nuts, hard fechtin and wearysome marching, for auld Scotland, sae brave and sae bonnie, wi’ its green grassy glens and high heather hills, its lochs and its woods! Ochone! Oh, Maister Ronald! gin we once mair saw Benmore, and fand the smell o’ oor ain peat reek, I dinna think we would be in a hurry to leave hame again. And then Miss Lisle o’ the big ha’ house would be your ain, and my bonnie doo Jessie mine! I have written to her three times, and deil a scrap o’ a letter has she sent me. She writes weil aneugh, thanks to the auld dominie at the schule o’ Latheronweel. But what does the laird say? Are a’ weil at oor ain ingle-neuck?" "All, Heaven be thanked!" replied Ronald, glancing rapidly over the pages of his father’s letter; "but leave me just now, Evan, and see who that is knocking in the piazzas below. I will detail the news from the glen afterwards." His father’s letter, although it contained many expressions of pride, praise, and exultation for Ronald’s conduct at Almarez, was written much in the same style as his others usually were: every thing was looking gloomy at home; the flocks and hirsels were perishing on the mountains, and the tenants in the glen had failed in their rents. "But they are our people," continued the old gentleman, "and I cannot drive them forth from the sheilings where they were born, and from the glen where the purple heather blooms so bonnily above the graves of their fathers. I cannot savagely expatriate, as other proprietors are doing daily, the descendants of those true and loyal vassals, who stood by our ancestors in danger and death during many a soul-stirring time in the years that are gone. No! I have more honour, compassion, and generosity. Poverty is their misfortune, not their crime. Heaven knows how little a space of time remains for me to be over them, as all my affairs are inextricably involved, and in a few months that letter of cautionary, granted in an evil hour to protect that rascal Macquirk, becomes due. God alone knows where I can raise the money. £8,000 will scarcely pay it, and I believe I will have to lay it down every stiver, as Macquirk has retreated to the sanctuary of Holyrood-house for protection from his creditors. Last month I was down in Edinburgh, endeavouring to procure the needful on a bond,—but in vain. Lochisla is too deeply involved already. Curse on the hour in which an honourable Highland gentleman of birth and family has to sue at and succumb to a narrow-hearted and blood-sucking attorney! a wretch that will make a beggar of any man who