[#] _in little brede_, without display. [#] _surë_, frank. How smart the saloon of the _White Dove_ looked that evening at dinner, with those geraniums, and roses, and fuchsias, and what not, set amid the tender green of the maidenhair fern! But all the same there was a serious discussion. Fruit, flowers, vegetables, and fresh milk, however welcome, fill no larder; and Master Fred had returned with the doleful tale that all his endeavours to purchase a sheep at one of the neighbouring farms had been of no avail. Forthwith we resolve to make another effort. Far away, on the outer shores of Dunvegan Loch, we can faintly descry, in the glow of the evening, some crofter’s huts on the slopes of the hill. Down with the gig, then, boys; in with the fishing-rods; and away for the distant shores, where haply, some tender ewe-lamb, or brace of quacking duck, or some half-dozen half-starved fowls may be withdrawn from the reluctant tiller of the earth! It is a beautiful clear evening, with lemon-gold glory in the north-west. And our stout-sinewed Doctor is rowing stroke, and there is a monotonous refrain of _Ho, ro, clansmen!_ _A long, strong pull together,_ _Ho, ro, clansmen!_ "We must give you a wage as one of the hands, Angus," says Queen T. "I am paid already," says he. "I would work my passage through for the sketch of Canna that Miss Avon gave me." "Would you like to ask the other men whether they would take the same payment?" says Miss Avon, in modest depreciation of her powers. "Do not say anything against the landscape ye gave to Dr. Sutherland," observes the Laird. "No, no; there is great merit in it. I have told ye before I would like to show it to Tom Galbraith before it goes south; I am sure he would approve of it. Indeed, he is jist such a friend of mine that I would take the leeberty of asking him to give it a bit touch here and there—what an experienced artist would see amiss ye know——" "Mr. Galbraith may be an experienced artist," says our Doctor friend with unnecessary asperity, "but he is not going to touch that picture." "Ah can tell ye," says the Laird, who is rather hurt by this rejection, "that the advice of Tom Galbraith has been taken by the greatest artists in England. He was up in London last year, and was at the studio of one of the first of the Acadameecians, and that very man was not ashamed to ask the opeenion of Tom Galbraith. And says Tom to him, ’The face is very fine, but the right arm is out of drawing.’ You would think that impertinent? The Acadameecian, I can tell you, thought differently. Says he, ’That has been my own opeenion, but no one would ever tell me so; and I would have left it as it is had ye no spoken.’"