ied out into the room and hung about
the ochred walls, and made more umber than it was before the map of
Europe over the fireplace. Looking at this map and sipping now and then
a glass of spirits in his hand, was a gentleman humming away to himself
"Merrily danced the Quaker's wife." He wore a queue tied with a broad
black ribbon that reached well down on his waist, and the rest of his
attire was conform in its antiquity, but the man himself was little more
than in his prime, straight set up like the soldier he was till he died
of the Yellow in Sierra Leone, where the name of Turner, Governor, is
still upon his peninsula.

"You are at your studies?" said Mr. Spencer to him, going up to his side
with a little deference for the General, and a little familiarity for
the son of a plain Portioner of Glen Shira who was to be seen any day
coming down the glen in his cart, with a mangy sporran flapping rather
emptily in front of his kilt.

Charlie Turner stopped his tune and turned upon the innkeeper.

"I scarcely need to study the map of Europe, Mr. Spencer," said he, "I
know it by heart--all of it of any interest at least. I have but to shut
my eyes and the panorama of it is before me. My brothers and I saw some
of it, Mr. Spencer, from Torres Vedras to the Pyrenees, and I'm but
looking at it now to amaze myself with seeing Albuera and Vittoria,
Salamanca and Talavera and Quatre Bras, put on this map merely as black
dots no more ken-speckle than the township of Camus up the glen. Wars,
wars, bloody wars! have we indeed got to the last of them?"

"Indeed I hope so, sir," said the innkeeper, "for my wife has become
very costly and very gaudy in her Waterloo blue silks since the
rejoicings, and if every war set a woman's mind running to extravagance
in clothing, the fewer we have the better."

"If I had a wife, Mr. Spencer (and alas! it's my fate to have lost
mine), I should make her sit down in weeds or scarlet, after wars, the
colour of the blood that ran. What do you say to that, General?"

He turned, as he spoke, to Dugald Campbell, who came to dregies *
because it was the fashion of the country, but never ate nor drank at
them.

* Dregy: The Scots equivalent of the old English _Dirge-
ale_, or funeral feast. From the first word of the antiphon
in the office for the dead, "_Dirige, Domine meus_,"

"You were speaking, General Turner?" said Campbell.

Turner fingered the seal upon his fob, with its mot