cialty of "exposures." If there was anything
weak and erring, anything particularly helpless and foolish which could
make no stand for itself, the "Night Hawk" was on the pounce. Hitherto
the junior reporter had never had a "two-column chance." He had read--it
was not much that he _had_ read--Macaulay's too famous article on
"Satan" Montgomery, and, not knowing that Macaulay lived to regret the
spirit of that assault, he felt that if he could bring down the "Night
Hawk" on "The Heather Lintie," his fortune was made. So he sat down and
he wrote, not knowing and not regarding a lonely woman's heart, to whom
his word would be as the word of a God, in the lonely cottage lying in
the lee of the Long Wood of Barbrax.

The junior reporter turned out a triumph of the new journalism. "This
is a book which may be a genuine source of pride to every native of the
ancient province of Galloway," he wrote. "Galloway has been celebrated
for black cattle and for wool, as also for a certain bucolic belatedness
of temperament, but Galloway has never hitherto produced a poetess. One
has arisen in the person of Miss Janet Bal-- something or other. We have
not an interpreter at hand, and so cannot wrestle with the intricacies
of the authoress's name, which appears to be some Galwegian form of
Erse or Choctaw. Miss Bal--and so forth--has a true fount of pathos and
humour. In what touching language she chronicles the death of two young
lambs which fell down into one of the puddles they call rivers down
there, and were either drowned or choked with the dirt:

"'They were two bonny, bonny lambs,
That played upon the daisied lea,
And loudly mourned their woolly dams
Above the drumly flowing Dee.'

"How touchingly simple!" continued the junior reporter, buckling up his
sleeves to enjoy himself, and feeling himself born to be a "Saturday
Reviewer."

"Mark the local colour, the wool and the dirty water of the Dee--without
doubt a name applied to one of their bigger ditches down there. Mark
also the over-fervency of the touching line,

"'And loudly mourned their woolly dams,'

"Which, but for the sex of the writer and her evident genius, might be
taken for an expression of a strength hardly permissible even in the
metropolis."

The junior reporter filled his two columns and enjoyed himself in the
doing of it. He concluded with the words: "The authoress will make a
great success. If she will come to the capital, where