leave the stockade of the screens, and venture into the campaign of the floor beyond. And then the hell of wind and snow that raved outside that! and the desert of air surrounding it, in which the clouds that garnered the snow were shaken by mad winds, whirled and tossed and buffeted, to make them yield their treasures! Lord Mergwain heard it, and drank. The laird listened, and lifted up his heart. Not much passed between them. The memories of the English lord were not such as he felt it fit to share with the dull old Scotchman beside him, who knew nothing of the world--knew neither how pitilessly selfish, nor how meanly clever a man of this world might be, and bate not a jot of his self admiration! Men who salute a neighbour as a man of the world, paying him the greatest compliment they know in acknowledging him of their kind, recoil with a sort of fear from the man alien to their thoughts, and impracticable for their purposes. They say “He is beyond me,” and despise him. So is there a great world beyond them with which they hold a frightful relationship--that of unrecognized, unattempted duty! Lord Mergwain regarded the odd-looking laird as a fool; the laird looked on him with something of the pity an angel must feel for the wretch to whom he is sent to give his last chance, ere sorer measures be taken in which angels are not the ministers. But the wine was at last beginning to work its too oft repeated and now nearly exhausted influence on the sagging and much frayed nerves of the old man. A yellowish remnant of withered rose began to smear his far-off west: he dared not look to the east; that lay terribly cold and gray; and he smiled with a little curl of his lip now and then, as he thought of this and that advantage he had had in the game of life, for alas! it had never with him risen to the dignity of a battle. He was as proud of a successful ruse, as a hero of a well fought and well won field. “I had him there!” stood with him for the joy of work done and salvation wrought. It was a repulsive smile--one that might move even to hatred the onlooker who was not yet divine enough to let the outrushing waves of pity swamp his human judgment. It only curled the cruel-looking upper lip, while the lower continued to hang thick, and sensual, and drawn into a protuberance in the middle. Gradually he seemed to himself, as he drank, to be recovering the common sense of his self-vaunted, vigorous nature. He assured himself that now he saw plainly the truth and fact of things--that his present outlook and vision were the true, and the horrors of the foregone night the weak soul-gnawing fancies bred of a disordered stomach. He was a man once more, and beyond the sport of a foolish imagination.