"Thanks, Symon," replied Lady Bruntisfield, giving him her hand to kiss. "I hope your gude wife is well, and that your youngest bairn got over its hooping cough by the means I prescribed." "My lady, wi' the advice o' a barber-chirurgeon----" "A barber-guse! did I not tell ye to pass that afflicted bairn three times through a blackberry bush, whilk is an infallible remedy--but I'll see after it mysel to-morrow." Lilian wept and laughed, and gave her hands to the servants to kiss, for her heart beat as joyously to find herself under the old ancestral roof, as if she had doubled Cape Horn since she last saw it. She kissed grand-aunt Grizel, and rushed from one dark and silent apartment to another, as if to gladden them by her happy presence, and looked forth with beaming eyes on the waving woods and the long expanse of the placid lake, whose dark bosom gave back the light of a thousand stars, and anon she paused to listen to that old familiar sound, the cawing of the rooks amid those great hereditary oaks, the remnants of the vast forest of Drumsheugh, which, in the days of St. David, surrounded the city and its castle on every side. Meantime, standing under the old velvet canopy, and leaning on her walking-cane, Lady Grizel was listening with a kindling eye and glowing cheek to her ground-baillie, who poured forth a dismal and exaggerated report of the extortions and outrages committed on her tenantry by Capt. Crichton's troop of the Grey Dragoons, who had carried off all the baillie's own grain, "whilk he had laid up for seed; they had taken the best cow, and a notable nowte from the gudeman of Netherdurdie, and nae less than three bonnie servitor lassies frae the farmtoun of Drumdryan; they had toomed every corn-ark, meal-girnel, and beer-barrel in the barony, forby and attour, extorting riding-money three times owre wi' cockit carbines!" It was a lamentable story, and three energetic taps from the Lady Grizel's cane closed the tale.