st movement so advertised his zeal,
and so clearly recalled the precariousness of our position, that I
could not sleep. In an hour or more after I lay down M'Iver alarmed
the advance-guard of my coming sleep by his unconscious whistle of a
pibroch, and I sat up to find that the cleric was sharing my waukrife
rest He had cast his peruke. In the light of a cruisie that hung at the
mantel-breas he was a comical-looking fellow with a high bald head, and
his eyes, that were very dark and profound, surrounded by the red rings
of weariness, all the redder for the pallor of his face. He stretched
his legs and rubbed his knees slowly, and smiled on me a little
mournfully.

"I'm a poor campaigner," said he; "I ought to be making the best of the
chance we have; but instead I must be thinking of my master and patron,
and about my flock in Inneraora town."

I seized the opportunity as a gled would jump at a dove.

"You're no worse than myself," I said, rising to poke up the fire; "I'm
thinking of Argile too, and I wish I could get his defalcation--if that
it may be called--out of my mind. Was it a--was it--what you might call
a desertion without dignity, or a step with half an excuse in policy? I
know MacCailein had an injured arm."

Gordon rose and joined me at the fireside. He seemed in a swither as to
whether I was a fit confidant or not in such a matter, but at last would
appear to decide in my favour.

"You have heard me speak well of Argile," he said, quietly. "I never
said a word in his praise that was not deserved; indeed I have been
limited in my valuation of his virtues and ornaments, lest they should
think it the paid chaplain who spoke and not the honest acquaintance.
I know pious men, Highland and Lowland, but my lord of Argile has more
than any of them the qualities of perfection. At home yonder, he rises
every morning at five and is in private till eight. He prays in his
household night and morning, and never went abroad, though but for one
night, but he took his write-book, standish, and English New Bible, and
Newman's Concordance with him. Last summer, playing one day with the
bullats with some gentlemen, one of them, when the Marquis stopped to
lift his bullat, fell pale, and said to them about him, 'Bless me, it
is that I see my lord with his head off and all his shoulder full of
blood.' A wicked man would have counted that the most gloomy portent
and a fit occasion for dread, for the person who spoke was the