wisdom and resolution whose spirit
men recognised through the veil of his frozen tongue; while cravens
shrank back, brave men rallied round him!

"Where is Boswell? _Mon Dieu!_ the house is burning and the master is
not found! Adolphe, _sauve la Marquise, cet escalier n'est pas perdu_.
But where is Boswell? Show his room to me--the nearest way--quick, or he
perishes. _Ah, le voila!_"

Down a flight of side steps stumbled the butler and a favourite groom,
bearing between them the young laird, motionless, senseless, his dress
dishevelled, but unscathed by flame, and unstained by blood; still
breathing, but his marked imperious features were unconscious, heavy,
and lethargic.

The Abbe and his elder friend exchanged glances. The brow of the latter
contracted in disgust and gloom.

"Adolphe and he played billiards against my desire, as if he were not
_bete_ enough already," he said in an undertone. "Lay him here, my
friends," to the servants, "and listen to me. If you love the Seigneur,
let him never know that thus it happened this night. Cover him with a
mantle; he will awake to see his chateau a ruin. _Mais, n'importe_, we
will do our best. Carry out what is most precious; bring up buckets of
water. _Ma foi!_ there is enough at hand."

Yes; at their feet, but by a few fathoms unavailable, lay the broad
sea, sufficient to extinguish the conflagration of a thousand cities,
while the house above was rent with fierce heat, which reddened the sea
like blood.

The Marquise was rescued sobbing and shivering, but she shared her
blanket with one of the poor servant-girls. Even the old bed-ridden
nurse, so blind and stupid with age that none could satisfy her of the
cause of the tumult and din, was carried out, and placed on the grass
terrace beside the master; where no sooner did she apprehend intuitively
the neighbourhood of her proudly cherished nursling, than she left off
her weak wailing, and began to croon over him as fondly and contentedly
as when he lay an innocent babe in his cradle:

"Are you weary, Earlscraig? Have you come back sorely tired from the
hunt or the race? Weary fa' the men folk that let you lie down with the
dew-draps on your bonny curls--bonnier than Miss Alice's, for a' their
fleechin'--as if it were high noon. No but noontide has its ills, too;
but you would never heed a bonnet, neither for sun nor wind. A wild
laddie, a wild laddie, Earlscraig!"

Eager but ignorant hands were piling up heaps of