opening into sheltered recesses and fairy corries. Great wealth of creamy meadowsweet grew below, and above wild roses, bluebells, foxgloves in their seasons, and especially yellow flowers-gay as jonquil ribands-Lady's bedstraw a foot in flower, potentillas, an orange-tufted star, and a pale straw-coloured dragon-fly, with blue, lilac, and white milkwort, met the purple heather. The hills had possessed much natural wood where 'Low down 't was in the broom,' and they still retained what they had originally owned of stripes of olive oak coppice, and plantations of silvery birks, stray mountain ashes, and old thorns, while the lairds had improved their opportunities of introducing birches and planes into their plantations. The detached fields, planted on terraces, were flourishing with creditable oats and bear-the very brown huts were burrowing together in sheltered nooks couthily and cozily, with poppling water and drooping branches, and free hills on every side of them. The whole formed a blooming glen in a bright day and a consoling pass to turn into in the white mist of a tempest.

Finralia, which crossed it, was as unlike in its character as the day of storm which succeeds the day of blue skies and zephyrs among the mountains. Finralia lay to the north, and was swept by the coldest winds, and had the earliest and latest snows. Finralia had been clothed with dark pinewood, cut as the exigencies of its masters demanded, with the bare, brown, rotting stumps, studded with speckled, poison

ous fungi, left like the back woods in Canada the first season before the virgin soil is broken for grain -but no corn fields would ever cover the bleak hill sides of Finralia. The burn in Aldour now spread itself out in placid reaches of that clear brown water of the north country, now capered and caracoled over red and white gravel, and between fragments of mossy rock tufted with ferns, and great slabs of grey stone glittering with mica. The burn in Finralia sank into a compressed channel, whence it growled half hidden, or emerged only into eddying black pools, where the foam seethed as if it were settling over some hapless drowned wight who had but relaxed his death grapple and sunk like to its dark depths. There was no silver shield of a lochan in Finralia; the house was higher and narrower than that of Aldour, and built on to a crumbling turret of the old castle, from which owls. hooted nightly, and so far from a woodbine porch, its first rough dash of lime had never been repeated, so that it had long settled down into a grim grey with sombre weather-stains and patches of watery, green moss; its offices were uncouth and tumble-down; its few fields were miserably poor, and its bhailies ruinous. Above all, the glen had a bad name; and give a glen, like a dog, a bad name and hang it, or clear it, for any good it is likely to do till it finds its reformer.

Spreaths or raids were over before Mary was born, but her father and mother remembered them well; and the last clouts' that had been lifted, far or near,

had been traced to Finralia. As Aldour belonged to a Macdonnel, Finralia was the property of a Fraser. While the Macdonnels had a high testimony and a high head in the district, the Frasers, from Lovat downwards, had an evil reputation and a hang-dog air. Of course they had given up their thefts, but they had not altogether amended their propensities. We have always our robber-chiefs among us, and they have only cast their sloughs and assumed new skins and transferred themselves largely to towns, and taken to plundering and pilfering professionally and commercially—at least, it was very much so with the Lairds of Finralia.

At the time of the rebellion, Aldour was saved from the destruction of the Macdonnels under young Glengarry, by being an orphan of tender age, but Finralia was 'out,' and although he afterwards made peace with the Hanoverian authorities, he did so under an odium so black, that he had better have been shot like a dog at once, or skulked like a beast of prey, or languished in exile. Under the burden of his bad name he was declared to have compromised his principles and betrayed his cause, and it was always attested as evidence that, although the devil rewarded him with freedom and office, and a certain measure of rank and fortune, personally a curse clung to him. He married, late in life, a weak-minded, bitter-tempered heiress of the Country, with whom he lived in such strife and scandal, that had she not met her death plainly by an accident from the overturn of a car, which Finralia

was not driving, on one of the steep roads, half of the Country would have said and sworn that Finralia had wrung her neck, or flung her from one of the beetling windows of the old castle. They would have said it under their breaths though, for Finralia was not only Finralia, he was agent to Pitfadden, the largest landed proprietor in the Country, and he had farther demeaned himself to qualify himself as a lawyer in his middle age, in order to monopolize every crown office in Inverluig, where he spent the most of his years. His only son, Roderick, was wild; the discords of his father's house, the company he saw there-the men who had fallen like his father-the dissolute, gambling officers, the fawning, crafty half pacers, were not likely to contribute to generosity of spirit or singleness of heart. His daughter Ussie was more deformed than Aldour's boy and girl, who had been struck by elfin arrows, or blighted by the baleful glances of the evil

eye.

But this Finralia had gone at last to his account, and left his son to inherit the old tainted blood, the ban of the betrayed on the traitor and his race, the malice and grudge of his living neighbours, as well as the dear-bought offices and authority. Young Finralia took up his residence in the grey, battered house of Finralia. Some said he only took the trouble to ride several times a week into Inverluig to transact his business there that he might be farther removed from all law and order; others declared, more charitably, that he meant to lead a more sober life, and for

the sake of his sister Ussie, who was rarely seen by strangers, and whom the vulgar knew not whether to class as an infidel or a witch-they agreed in this, a terrible, vindictive sprite was Miss Ussie of Finralia.

Mary Aldour had met young Finralia a few times— a very few times-at the Robertsons of Croclune, who were not particular about the company they kept; after the chapel at Choillean, which some gentlemen were supposed to attend more as a token of loyalty to King George than to make their confessions and swear their vows to the King of Heaven; at the roup at Barvich; and the games at Auchnaglas. That Mary Aldour and Finralia should view each other far apart and with suspicion and aversion was certain, but so far did class connexion and formal propriety of manners prevail, that Mary and Finralia did not fail to greet each other at the heads of their respective glens-Mary, in the opening into honest, virtuous, green Aldour; Finralia displayed against the gloomy pinewood, or waste clearing of Finralia-Mary, with her fair complexion, which would not tan, and her lintwhite locks, which yet looked as if they had been bleached by rough sun and wind into innocent flaxenness, as one sees the white crown of some sturdy independent boy; Finralia, in what was then considered the mature prime of his eight-and-twenty years, with the warm brown, that reminded one of a Gallic extraction, on brow and cheek, the half lounge, half slouch that concealed his proportions and spoilt the impression of the thews and sinews of his manli→