“Well, I'm damned!” cried he, “but this is a black welcome to one's poor brother Andy,” and scarcely looked upon my father standing with the shaded candle in the wind. “What's to drink? Drink, do you hear that Quentin? Drink--drink--d-r-i-n-k. A long strong drink too, and that's telling you, and none of the whey that I'm hearing's running through the Greigs now, that once was a reputable family of three bottles and a rummer to top all.” “Whist, whist, man!” pleaded father tremulously, all the man out of him as he stood before this drunken apparition. “Whist I quo' he. Well stap me! do you no' ken the lean pup of the litter?” hiccoughed our visitor, with a sort of sneer that made the blood run to my head, and for the first time I felt the great, the splendid joy of a good cause to fight for. “You're Andrew,” said my father simply, putting his hand upon the man's coat sleeve in a sympathy for his drenchen clothes. That kindly hand was jerked off rudely, an act as insolent as if he had smitten his host upon the mouth: my heart leaped, and my fingers went at his throat. I could have spread him out against the wall, though I knew him now my uncle; I could have given him the rogue's quittance with a black face and a protruding tongue. The candle fell from my father's hand; the glass shade shattered; the hall of Hazel Den House was plunged in darkness, and the rain drave in through the open door upon us three struggling. “Let him go, Paul,” whispered my father, who I knew was in terror of frightening his wife, and he wrestled mightily with an arm of each of us. Yet I could not let my uncle go, for with the other arm he held a knife, and he would perhaps have died for it had not another light come on the stair and my mother's voice risen in a pitiful cry. We fell asunder on a common impulse, and the drunken wanderer was the first to speak. “Katrine,” said he; “it's always the old tale with Andy, you see; they must be misunderstanding me,” and he bowed with a surprising gentlemanliness that could have made me almost think him not the man who had fouled our house with oaths and drawn a knife upon us in the darkness. The blade of the same, by a trick of legerdemain, had gone up the sleeve of his dripping coat. He seemed all at once sobered. He took my good mother by the hand as she stood trembling and never to know clearly upon what elements of murder she had come. “It is you, Andrew,” said she, bravely smiling. “What a night to come home in after twenty years! I'm wae to see you in such a plight. And your horse?” said she again, lifting her candle and peering into the darkness of the night. “I must cry up Sandy to stable your horse.” I'll give my uncle the credit of a confusion at his own forgetfulness. “Good Lord! Katrine,” said he, “if I did not clean forget the brute, a fiddle-faced, spavined, spatter-dasher of a Gorbals mare, no' worth her corn; but there's my bit kistie on her hump.”