ng "God Save the Queen" with the rest of the
Pettybaw villagers.

The land darkened; the wind blew chill. Willie, Mr. Macdonald, and Mr.
Anstruther brought rugs, and found a sheltered nook for us where we
might still watch the scene. There we sat, looking at the plains
below, with all the village streets sparkling with light, with rockets
shooting into the air and falling to earth in golden rain, with red
lights flickering on the gray lakes, and with one beacon-fire after
another gleaming from the hilltops, till we could count more than
fifty answering one another from the wooded crests along the shore,
some of them piercing the rifts of low-lying clouds till they seemed
to be burning in mid-heaven.

Then, one by one, the distant fires faded, and as some of us still sat
there silently, far, far away in the gray east there was a faint flush
of carmine where the new dawn was kindling in secret. Underneath that
violet bank of cloud the sun was forging his beams of light. The
pole-star paled. The breath of the new morrow stole up out of the rosy
gray. The wings of the morning stirred and trembled; and in the
darkness and chill and mysterious awakening, eyes looked into other
eyes, hand sought hand, and cheeks touched each other in mute caress.

XXVII

"Sun, gallop down the westlin skies,
Gang soon to bed, an' quickly rise;
O lash your steeds, post time away,
And haste about our bridal day!"

_The Gentle Shepherd_.

Every noon, during this last week, as we have wended our way up the
loaning to the Pettybaw inn for our luncheon, we have passed three
magpies sitting together on the topmost rail of the fence. I am not
prepared to state that they were always the same magpies; I only know
there were always three of them. We have just discovered what they
were about, and great is the excitement in our little circle. I am to
be married to-morrow, and married in Pettybaw, and Miss Grieve says
that in Scotland the number of magpies one sees is of infinite
significance: that one means sorrow; two, mirth; three, a marriage;
four, a birth, and we now recall as corroborative detail that we saw
one magpie, our first, on the afternoon of her arrival.

Mr. Beresford has been cabled for, and must return to America at once
on important business. He persuaded me that the Atlantic is an ower
large body of water to roll between two lovers, and I agreed with all
my heart.

A wedding was arra