d there was a good deal of
scrapings, which was lucky for both Tweed and Tyke, as well as good for
Kit Kennedy.

Now, this is the way that Kit Kennedy--that kinless loon, without father
or mother--won his breakfast.

He had hardly finished and licked his spoon, the dogs sitting on their
haunches and watching every rise and fall of the horn, when a
well-known voice shrilled through the air--

"Kit Kennedy, ye lazy, ungrateful hound, come ben to the "Buik." Ye are
no better than the beasts that perish, regairdless baith o' God and
man!"

So Kit Kennedy cheerfully went in to prayers and thanksgiving, thinking
himself not ill off. He had had his breakfast.

And Tweed and Tyke, the beasts that perish, put their noses into the
porridge-pot to see if Kit Kennedy had left anything. There was not so
much as a single grain of meal.

THE BACK O' BEYONT

I

_O nest, leaf-hidden, Dryad's green alcove,
Half-islanded by hill-brook's seaward rush,
My lovers still bower, where none may come but I!
Where in clear morning prime and high noon hush
With only some old poet's book I lie!
Sometimes a lonely dove
Calleth her mate, or droning honey thieves
Weigh down the bluebell's nodding campanule;
And ever singeth through the twilight cool
Low voice of water and the stir of leaves_.

II

_Perfect are August's golden afternoons!
All the rough way across the fells, a peal
Of joy-bells ring, not heard by alien ear.
The jealous brake and close-shut beech conceal
The sweet bower's queen and mine, albeit I hear
Hummed scraps of dear old tunes,
I push the boughs aside, and lo, I look
Upon a sight to make one more than wise,--
A true maid's heart, shining from tender eyes,
Rich with love's lore, unlearnt in any book_.

"_Memory Harvest_."

"An' what brings the lang-leggit speldron howkin' an' scrauchlin' owre
the Clints o' Drumore an' the Dungeon o' Buchan?" This was a question
which none of Roy Campbell's audience felt able to answer. But each
grasped his rusty Queen's-arm musket and bell-mouthed horse-pistol with
a new determination. The stranger, whoever he might be, was manifestly
unsafe. Roy Campbell had kept the intruder under observation for some
time through the weather-beaten ship's prospect-glass which he had
stayed cumbrously on the edge of a rock. The man was poking about among
rocks and _debri