he wit to keep
an enemy from striking the same. If the nose was Argile's, it might be
twisted off his face while he debated upon his right to guard it."

"You're in some ways a lucky man," said the Marquis, still in the most
sad and tolerant humour. "Did you never have a second's doubt about the
right of your side in battle?"

"Here's to the doubt, sir!" said M'Iver. "I'm like yourself and every
other man in a quandary of that kind, that thinking on it rarely brought
me a better answer to the guess than I got from my instinct to start
with."

Argile put his fingers through his hair, clearing the temples, and
shutting wearied eyes on a perplexing world.

"I have a good deal of sympathy with John's philosophy," I said,
modestly. "I hold with my father that the sword is as much God's scheme
as the cassock. What are we in this expedition about to start but the
instruments of Heaven's vengeance on murtherers and unbelievers?"

"I could scarcely put it more to the point myself," cried M'Iver. "A
soldier's singular and essential duty is to do the task set him with
such art and accomplishment as he can--in approach, siege, trench, or
stronghold."

"Ay, ay! here we are into our dialectics again," said his lordship,
laughing, with no particular surrender in his merriment. "You gentlemen
make no allowance for the likelihood that James Grahame, too, may be
swearing himself Heaven's chosen weapon. 'Who gave Jacob to the spoil
and Israel to the robbers--did not I, the Lord?' Oh, it's a confusing
world!"

"Even so, MacCailein; I'm a plain man," said M'Iver, "though of a good
family, brought up roughly among men, with more regard to my strength
and skill of arm than to book-learning; but I think I can say that here
and in this crisis I am a man more fit, express, and appropriate than
yourself. In the common passions of life, in hate, in love, it is the
simple and confident act that quicker achieves its purpose than the
cunning ingenuity. A man in a swither is a man half absent, as poor a
fighter as he is indifferent a lover; the enemy and the girl will escape
him ere he has throttled the doubt at his heart There's one test to my
mind for all the enterprises of man--are they well contrived and carried
to a good conclusion? There may be some unco quirks to be performed, and
some sore hearts to confer at the doing of them, but Heaven itself, for
all its puissance, must shorten the pigeon's wing that the gled of the
wood may have