lander 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
an implanted instinct not vouchsafed to all, that it is more bl