“Not got two decanters, you fool?” sneered his lordship, enraged at not having the whole bottle set down to him at once. “But after all,” he resumed, “it mayn’t be worth a rush, not to say a decanter. Bring the bottle. Set it down. Here!--Carefully! Bring a glass. You should have brought the glasses first. Bring three; I like to change my glass. Make haste, will you!” The laird did make haste, smiling at the exigence of his visitor. Lord Mergwain listened to the glug-glug in the long neck of the decanter as if it had been a song of love, and the moment it was over, was holding the glass to his nose. “Humph! Not much aroma here!” he growled, “I ought to have made the old fool”--the laird must have been some fifteen years younger than he.--“set it down before the fire--only what would have become of me while it was thawing? It’s no wonder though! By the time I’ve been buried as long, I shall want thawing too!” The wine, however, turned out more satisfactory to the palate of the toper than to his nostrils--which in truth, so much had he drunk that day, were at present incapable of doing it justice--and he set himself to enjoy it. How that should be possible to a man for whom the accompanying dried olives of memory could do so little, I find it difficult to understand. One would think, to enjoy his wine alone, a man must have either good memories or good hopes: Lord Mergwain had forgotten the taste of hope; and most men would shrink from touching the spring that would set a single scene of such a panorama unrolling itself, as made up the past of Lord Mergwain. However there he sat, and there he drank, and, truth to tell, now and then smiled grimly. The laird set a pair of brass candlesticks on the table--there were no silver utensils any more in the house of Glenwarlock; years ago the last of them had vanished--and retired to a wooden chair at the end of the hearth, under the lamp that hung on the wall. But on his way he had taken from a shelf an old, much-thumbed folio which Mr. Simon had lent him--the journal of George Fox, and the panorama which then for a while kept passing before his mind’s eye, was not a little different from that passing before Lord Mergwain’s. What a study to a spirit able to watch the unrolling of the two side by side! In a few minutes Grizzie entered, carrying a fowl newly killed, its head almost touching the ground at the end of its long, limp neck. She seated herself on a stool, somewhere about the middle of the large space, and proceeded to pluck, and otherwise prepare it for the fire. Having, last of all, split it open from end to end, turning it into something like an illegible heraldic crest, she approached the fire, the fowl in one hand, the gridiron in the other. “I doobt I maun get his lordship to sit a wee back frae the fire,” she said. “I maun jist bran’er this chuckie for his supper.”