declare to you I am quite cheery thinking we will be coming back
again to those glens and mounts we have found so cruel because of our
loneliness, and giving the MacDonalds and the rest of the duddy crew the
sword in a double dose."

"Ay, John," said I, "it's easy for you to be light-hearted in the
matter. You may readily build your bachelor's house at Barbreck, and I
may set up again the barn at Elrigmore; but where husband or son is gone
it's a different story. For love is a passion stronger than hate. Are
you not wondering that those good folk on either hand of us should
not be so stricken that they would be sitting in ashes, weeping like
Rachel?"

"We are a different stuff from the lady you mention," he said; "I am
aye thinking the Almighty put us into this land of rocks and holds, and
scalloped coast, cold, hunger, and the chase, just to keep ourselves
warm by quarrelling with each other. If we had not the recreation now
and then of a bit splore with the sword, we should be lazily rotting to
decay. The world's well divided after all, and the happiness as well as
the dule of it. It is because I have never had the pleasure of wife nor
child I am a little better off to-day than the weeping folks about me,
and they manage to make up their share of content with reflections upon
the sweetness of revenge. There was never a man so poor and miserable in
this world yet but he had his share of it, even if he had to seek it in
the bottle. Amn't I rather clever to think of it now? Have you heard of
the idea in your classes?"

"It is a notion very antique," I confessed, to his annoyance; "but it
is always to your credit to have thought it out for yourself. It is
a notion discredited here and there by people of judgment, but a very
comfortable delusion (if it is one) for such as are well off, and would
salve their consciences against the miseries of the poor and distressed.
And perhaps, after all, you and the wise man of old are right; the
lowest state--even the swineherd's--may have as many compensations as
that of his master the Earl. It is only sin, as my father would say,
that keeps the soul in a welter------"

"Does it indeed?" said John, lightly; "the merriest men ever I met were
rogues. I've had some vices myself in foreign countries, though I aye
had the grace never to mention them, and I ken I ought to be stewing
with remorse for them, but am I?"

"Are you?" I asked.

"If you put it so straight, I'll say No--sav