On Sabbaths my cousin and his two brothers attended the parish church, attired in the full Highland dress; and three handsome, well-formed men they were; but my aunt, though mayhap not quite without the mother's pride, did not greatly relish the exhibition; and oftener than once I heard her say so to her sister my mother; though she, smitten by the gallant appearance of her nephews, seemed inclined rather to take the opposite side. My uncle, on the other hand, said nothing either for or against the display. He had been a keen Highlander in his younger days; and when the inhibition against wearing tartan and the philabeg had been virtually removed, in consideration of the achievements of the "hardy and dauntless men" who, according to Chatham, conquered for England "in every quarter of the globe," he had celebrated the event in a merrymaking, at which the dance was kept up from night till morning; but though he retained, I suspect, his old partialities, he was now a sobered man; and when I ventured to ask him, on one occasion, why he too did not get a Sunday kilt, which, by the way, he would "_have set_," notwithstanding his years, as well as any of his sons, he merely replied with a quiet "No, no; there's no fool like an old fool." CHAPTER VI. "When they sawe the darksome night, They sat them downe and cryed."--BABES IN THE WOOD. I spent the holidays of two other autumns in this delightful Highland valley. On the second, as on the first occasion, I had accompanied my mother, specially invited; but the third journey was an unsanctioned undertaking of my own and a Cromarty cousin, my contemporary, to whom, as he had never travelled the way, I had to act as protector and guide. I reached my aunt's cottage without mishap or adventure of any kind; but found, that during the twelvemonth which had just elapsed, great changes had taken place in the circumstances of the household. My cousin George, who had married in the interim, had gone to reside in a cottage of his own; and I soon ascertained that my cousin William, who had been for several months resident with his father, had not nearly so many visitors as before; nor did presents of salmon and haunches of venison come at all so often the way. Immediately after the final discomfiture of Napoleon, an extensive course of speculation in which he had ventured to engage had turned out so ill, that, instead of making him a fortune, as at first seemed probable, it had landed him in the _Gazette_; and he was now tiding over the difficulties of a time of settlement, six hundred miles from the scene of disaster, in the hope of being soon enabled to begin the world anew. He bore his losses with quiet magnanimity; and I learned to know and like him better during his period of eclipse than in the previous time, when summer friends had fluttered around him by scores. He was a generous, warm-hearted man, who felt, with the force of