re heinous crime.

It was observed upon her examination that she treated the questions
respecting the death of Kennedy, or 'the gauger,' as she called him, with
indifference; but expressed great and emphatic scorn and indignation at
being supposed capable of injuring little Harry Bertram. She was long
confined in jail, under the hope that something might yet be discovered
to throw light upon this dark and bloody transaction. Nothing, however,
occurred; and Meg was at length liberated, but under sentence of
banishment from the county as a vagrant, common thief, and disorderly
person. No traces of the boy could ever be discovered; and at length the
story, after making much noise, was gradually given up as altogether
inexplicable, and only perpetuated by the name of 'The Gauger's Loup,'
which was generally bestowed on the cliff from which the unfortunate man
had fallen or been precipitated.

CHAPTER XI
ENTER TIME, AS CHORUS
I, that please some, try all, both joy and terror
Of good and bad; that make and unfold error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings Impute it not a crime
To me, or my swift passage, that I slide
O'er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap.

Winter's Tale.

Our narration is now about to make a large stride, and omit a space of
nearly seventeen years; during which nothing occurred of any particular
consequence with respect to the story we have undertaken to tell. The gap
is a wide one; yet if the reader's experience in life enables him to look
back on so many years, the space will scarce appear longer in his
recollection than the time consumed in turning these pages.

It was, then, in the month of November, about seventeen years after the
catastrophe related in the last chapter, that, during a cold and stormy
night, a social group had closed around the kitchen-fire of the Gordon
Arms at Kippletringan, a small but comfortable inn kept by Mrs.
Mac-Candlish in that village. The conversation which passed among them
will save me the trouble of telling the few events occurring during this
chasm in our history, with which it is necessary that the reader should
be acquainted.

Mrs. Mac-Candlish, throned in a comfortable easychair lined with black
leather, was regaling herself and a neighbouring gossip or two with a cup
of genuine tea, and at the same time keeping a sharp eye upon her
domestics, as they went and