nd bright, from Loch Tay to the sea, between wooded
banks and overhanging trees, past cornfields and ancient castles; a
river for him who swims, or rows, or fishes, or dreams, in which, if
such were to be his fate, a man might ask to be drowned. Opposite him
began the woods of Muirtown Castle, and he tried to be glad that
Kate . . . Miss Carnegie would one day be their mistress: the formal
announcement of her engagement, he had heard, was to be made next week,
on Lord Kilspindie's birthday. A distant whistle came on the clear air
from Muirtown station, where . . . and all this turmoil of hope and
fear, love and despair, had been packed into a few months. There is a
bend in the river where he sits, and the salmon fishers have dropped
their nets, and are now dragging them to the bank. With a thrill of
sympathy Carmichael watched the fish struggling in the meshes, and his
heart leapt when, through some mishandling, one escaped with a flash of
silver and plunged into the river. He had also been caught quite
suddenly in the joyous current of his life and held in bonds. Why
should he not make a bold plunge for freedom, which he could never have
with the Lodge at his doors, with the Castle only twelve miles away?
He had been asked in his student days to go to the north-west of Canada
and take charge of a parish fifty miles square. The idea had for a
little fired his imagination, and then faded before other ambitions.
It revived with power on the banks of that joyful, forceful river, and
he saw himself beginning life again on the open prairie lands--riding,
camping, shooting, preaching--a free man and an apostle to the Scottish
Dispersion.

With this bracing resolution, that seemed a call of God to deliver him
from bondage, came a longing to visit Kilbogie Manse and the Rabbi's
grave. It was a journey of expiation, for Carmichael followed the road
the Rabbi walked with the hand of death upon him after that lamentable
Presbytery, and he marked the hills where the old man must have stood
and fought for breath. He could see Mains, where he had gone with
Doctor Saunderson to the exposition, and he passed the spot where the
Rabbi had taken farewell of George Pitillo in a figure. What learning,
and simplicity, and unselfishness, and honesty, and affection were
mingled in the character of the Rabbi! What skill, and courage, and
tenderness, and self-sacrifice, and humility there had been also in
William MacLure, who had just