WHO WAS LOST AND IS FOUND _A NOVEL_ BY MRS OLIPHANT WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS EDINBURGH AND LONDON MDCCCXCIV _All Rights reserved_ _ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN ‘BLACKWOOD’S MAGAZINE’_ WHO WAS LOST AND IS FOUND. CHAPTER I. One of the most respected inhabitants of the village, rather of the parish, of Eskholm in Mid-Lothian was Mrs Ogilvy, still often called Mrs James by the elder people who had known her predecessors, who had seen her married, and knew everything about her, her antecedents and belongings. This is a thing very satisfactory in one way, as giving you an assurance that nothing can be suddenly found out about you, no disreputable new member or incident foisted into your family life; while, on the other hand, it has its inconveniences, since it becomes more or less the right of your neighbours to have every new domestic occurrence explained to them in all its bearings. Great peace, however, had for a long time fallen over the house in which Mrs James Ogilvy was spending the end of her quiet days: no new incident had occurred there for years: its daily routine to all appearance went on as cheerfully as could be desired. It was one of the prettiest houses of the neighbourhood. Built on the side of a little hill, as so many houses are in Scotland, it was a tallish two-storeyed house behind, plunging its foundations deep in the soil, with an ample garden lying east and south, full of all the old-fashioned vegetables and most of the old-fashioned flowers of its period. But in front it was the trimmest cottage, low but broad, opening upon a little round platform encircled by a drive, and that, in its turn, by closely clipped holly-hedges, as thick as a wall and as smooth. Andrew, the gardener, thought it more genteel to fill the little flower-border in front with bedding-out plants in the summer,--red geraniums, blue lobelias, and so forth--never the pansies and gillyflowers his mistress loved,--and it was only with great difficulty that he had been prevented from shutting out the view by a clump of rhododendrons in the middle of the grass plot. “The view!” Andrew said in high contempt: but this time his mistress had her way. The view, perhaps, was nothing very wonderful to eyes accustomed to fine scenery. A bit of the road that led to Edinburgh and the world was visible among the trees at the foot of the brae, where the private path of the Hewan between its close holly-hedges sloped upward to the house: and behind stretched the full expanse of country,--the towers of the castle making a break among the clouds of trees on one hand, and some of the roofs of the village and the little stumpy church-steeple showing on the other side. Between these two points, and far on either side, the