terms.” The Captain, though he used to admire Roderick’s natural logic, regarded it with a very different feeling when he found it brandished against himself. “Roderick,” said he, and he swore a deadly oath, “you shall either vote for Mr. Simpson or quit your farm at Whitsunday first.” “You at least gie me my choice,” said the honest farmer, and turning abruptly from him he stalked into the barn. Roderick left his plough in the furrow on the day fixed for the meeting, and went into the house to prepare for it, by dressing himself in his best clothes. His wife had learned the result of his conference with the laird, and, in her opinion, the argument of threatened ejection was a more powerful one than any that could be advanced by the opposite party. Repeatedly did she urge it, but to no effect; Roderick was stubborn as an old Covenanter. She watched, however, her opportunity; and when he went in to dress, which he always did in a small apartment formed by an outjet of the cottage, she followed him, as if once more to repeat what she had so often repeated already, but in reality with a very different intention. She suffered him to throw off his clothes, piece by piece, without the slightest attempt to prevent him; but at the moment when his head and arms were involved in the intricacies of a stout linen shirt, she snatched up his holiday bonnet, coat, and waistcoat, together with the articles of dress he had just relinquished, and rushing out of the apartment with them, shut and bolted the door behind her. To place against it every article of furniture which the outer room afforded, was the work of the first minute; and to advise her liege lord to betake himself to the bed which his prison contained until the kirk should have _skailed_, was her employment in the second. Roderick was not to be baulked so. There was a window in the apartment, which, had the walls been of stone, would scarcely have afforded passage to an ordinary-sized cat, but luckily they were of turf. Into this opening he insinuated first his head, next his shoulders, and wriggling from side to side until the whole wall heaved with the commotion, he wormed himself into liberty; and then set off for the church of Cromarty, without bonnet, coat, or waistcoat. An angry man was Roderick; and the anger, which he well knew would gain him nothing if wreaked on the gudewife, was boiling up against the Captain and Mr. Simpson. He entered the church, and in a moment every eye in it was turned on him. The schoolmaster, a thin serious-looking person, sat in the precentor’s desk, with his writing materials before him, to take down the names of the voters, hundreds of whom thronged the body of the church. Captain Urquhart, in an attitude between sitting and standing, occupied one of the opposite pews; about half a dozen of his servants lounged behind him. He was a formidable-looking, dark-complexioned, square-shouldered man, of about