to his wife, didn't he?-is another matter altogether. And how could she settle down to this humdrum life after all the excitement and gaiety she's been accustomed to?"

"Women do such things every day. Besides "

"Yes?"

"Is Peter still so much enamored of a humdrum life?" said John, dryly.

"I have had no opportunity of finding out; but I am sure he will want to settle down quietly when all this is over-"

"You mean when he's no longer in love with Sarah?"

"He's barely one and twenty; it can't last," said Lady Mary.

"I don't know. If she's so much cleverer than he, I'm inclined to think it may," said John.

"Oh, of course, if he married herit would last," said Lady Mary. "And then?" said John, smiling. "Perhaps then," said Lady Mary; and she laid her hand softly in the strong hand outstretched to receive it.

MacTavish, the gamekeeper, came home the other evening in an excited condition. He had been enjoying a night and day out on the fine stream over which his brother, also a keeper, exercised watch and ward for his master, Lord B. The sea-trout were up, and MacTavish was not the man to neglect them in the prime of their freshness and numbers. He had fished all night and the greater part of the day, and a bag of twenty-three beauties was the result. Of these he brought home only the odd three, weighing two and a half pounds apiece on the average, when relieved of their insides. A dead weight of seven or eight pounds was quite enough for his shoulders in the fourteen-mile walk home over the hills. But he brought with him something else, in his own inside; to wit, a blamable number of drams of whiskey. When he lurched into the byre, where I was contemplating my rod, the whiskey proclaimed itself. "Eh, mon," he exclaimed, "the grand time I've had! There's folks 'ud give their ears for such a night, and,-I'm just thirsting for a wee drip from your bottle."

As

He clapped me on the shoulder with the words and looked what he was. It was the first time he had displayed such democratic good-fellowship. the person who rented his parlor and the bedroom with two really spacious windows to it under the thatch, I was, in his wife's opinion, a gentleman of some distinction, whether or not I was a good fisherman, and MacTavish lived in wholesome fear of his wife's prejudices. He had already put me to the challenge on the subject of his own absorbing passion. "Are ye a real fisher?" he had asked .me once. "Will ye go through fire and water and all the midges in all Scotland's glens putt together to land a bonnie salmon? If ye're not that and just that, ye're nothing by-ordinar' ye ken." And I had hesitated to admit that I merited so sweeping a certificate of character. The midges in our one glen were quite enough to go on with: to say nothing about the atrociously awkward upholstery to certain of the pools. But those drams made the difference to MacTavish. "Let me creep in quiet with you," he suggested, in an earnest undertone. "The wife's that

crabbit when I've been awa'. Maybe she'd not like me taking a nip with you."

Well, I gave MacTavish the bottle, not without misgivings, even though he had a physique of wire and steel. And with the glass in his hand he proceeded to tell of the three salmons, over and above the twenty-three seatrout, which had blessed the last four and twenty hours of his life. "They werena by-ordinar' great fish, ye ken," he said; "but there was a saxteenpunder, a fourteen-punder, and one of eleven punds. I'm thinking my lord himsel' wouldn't have minded taking any one of the three; and I didna give more than ten minutes to the bonniest of them. It was the silver doctor that did for them, and, mon, this very night it shall do more still. Wud ye like to see me kill a salmon in the stream here?"

He looked so very tipsy that I attempted to soothe him; I told him he would be much better in bed, having first yielded to the wifely attentions of Mrs. MacTavish. And then I am sorry to say he was rude about Mrs. MacTavish. If he made up his mind to get a salmon, whether in the forenoon, the evening, or the night, he was not the man to ask his wife's leave,nor his master's either. "I'm here to mind the fishing for my master, ye ken," he said thickly; "but I'm a mon as well as my master, and if I say I'm going to get a salmon, Donald MacTavish is going to get it, he is that. And it's the silver doctor that'll do it, the same as with those three other bonnie fish. Mon, ye'd have liked fine to see them. It was when day was breaking over the hills and the heaviest didna cost me eight minutes from the time I was into him. Bide a wee and we'll be off together. The light's too strong yet; they'll see us coming. But in half an hour it'll do fine, and it'll be your fish, ye ken. You shall

send it to England to your friends; ay, that's how we'll dispose of it, and no word said to a' body."

He accommodated more whiskey, in spite of protests, and then, in the valor of it, went down boldly to his wife and in boisterous heroic tones told her of his rare sport in the night even as he had told me. The words "Saxteen-punder!- Silver doctor! — Eh, woman, it was a night!" and others drifted up through my floor. And by-and-by his heavy tread shook the pine-panelled stairs while his voice assured Mrs. MacTavish that he was going out and that no powers, supernal nor otherwise, should stop him, and that I was going with him. My parlor lamp was already lit. It was ten o'clock on a midsummer night, and the lamp was barely necessary; but there were heavy clouds over the trees and birch-clad hills beyond my parlor window, and the stream's bed was densely shrouded with oaks as well as birches and pines and cliffs in places more than a hundred feet perpendicular. It was likely to be dark enough and more for those inky pools which terraced down from the upper glen, linked by falls which roared night and day, wet weather or dry. "Indeed ye shall not go, MacTavish." urged the wife; and "Indeed, but I will," quoth he. And then he charged into my room, with his wife at his heels, apologizing for him. "It's no the silver doctor this time, mon," he cried. "I'm detarmined ye shall have a salmon as big as any I took in the night, and we'll get him with the minnow. Are ye ready?"

Arguments were only an exasperation to him, and Mrs. MacTavish withdrew to her kitchen and the baby, in despair of a sort. "It's not for himself I'm afraid," she said to me, "but it's his insulting conduct to you, sir. He's no himself." That, I assured her. was all right. If she thought taking a salmon at eleven or twelve o'clock at

night would reduce MacTavish to a suitably drowsy and exhausted condittion for his bed, why we would go for the salmon as an opiate. And almost on that understanding he and I set forth when, with much fumbling and a certain amount of language, MacTavish had fixed the minnow to the stiff, yet not too stiff, fourteen-foot rod which had already done such good execution that day. "Ye'll not breathe a word about it, mon," he whispered tipsily. "There's things it wudna do to get to my master's ear; and I'm weel hated by all the folks here as it is, just because I do what I'm paid for in keeping their cattle bodies off the hills and stopping them at the rabbits."

And then he had done with mere speech for the while. He made like a bull headlong for the woods beyond the meadow patch, lurching in the gloom, with his rod swaying behind him. In and out he wound among the trees, the darkness growing as we came under the shadows of the cliffs. There were polished pine-roots and mossed and slippery stones to be tackled on an incline towards the water which was not comfortable in that less than half light; and the dull gleam of the dark pools beneath, smeared heavily with foam at their beginning and their end, showed through the trellis of dwarfed birch and ash which bowered the water. full sunshine I had gone but once hitherto to this particular pool under MacTavish's careful and sober guidance, and he had then expatiated about the dangers of the path.

In

"Ye'll please

to putt your foot there, sir," he had said at intervals. "It's an awful bad spot, and ever since an Edinburgh clergyman that was drooned in it and just bobbed up and doon with the suck, ye ken, so as I thought we'd never get his corp for his wife, poor body, crying her eyes oot on the edge yonder,-ever

since, there's no visitor that dares to touch it. It's what folks call a whirlpool. If ye go in ye go under; then ye go roond and roond and get dancit up when it's least expectit, and before a' body can get a snatch at ye, ye're doon again. Eh, sir, it's a gey queer spot is the Black Pool. And eighteen-feet deep straight from the edge, just!" So much for MacTavish's daylight and intelligent appreciation of our pool. But now, at a quarter to eleven at night, in a cloak of confounding gloom, shadows, and midges, with nearer a pint than half a pint of Scotch whiskey in him, he slipped and scrambled obliquely among the pine-roots and the two-inch foot-holes, with never a word of warning for me and, so it seemed, never a care either. And he handled his rod in that uncanny descent like the born artist in fishing that he was; nothing but the second nature which is a kind of genius kept him from enmeshing its point or breaking it among the trees and bushes.

At the bottom of the drop the rocks lay in a sublimely picturesque confusion, studded with bilberry green and birch tufts. A wedge-like peninsula of rock, sharp edge uppermost, protruded towards the cascade, from the other side of which the bank was a red and gray wall, with black firs and oaks studding it, some at a clean right angle out from the rock. The pool itself, perhaps a hundred and twenty yards in area, filled the hollow. I was still many vertical feet from its lip, hanging on to roots and things and sweating with anxiety, heat, and the irritation of the midges, when MacTavish cried up from his perch: "For God's sake mind what ye're aboot. Stay where ye are, or ye'll be in the water. It's the minnow that's got to do the trick this time." he added, as an inconsequent corollary, with a curious change of tone from the fiercely admonitory to the intimately reflec

Mac

tive. And then I sweated with rather more vigor than before as my feet went through a narrow ledge of rotten moss, heather, and bracken roots and I realized that MacTavish's eyes had a wonderful keenness of vision. He had discerned my peril in the nick of time. The black water was underneath me, and but for the strength of the roots in my clutch, I should have gone down like a lead plummet, and made acquaintance, on the instant, with the maelstrom of the Black Pool in which the historic clergyman of Edinburgh had "bobbit up and doon" for hours ere he was gaffed by the aid of two joined broomsticks and dragged to land for the one connubial satisfaction that remained to his widow. And even while I was taking my bearings, with half a fresh foothold secured and my handhold still good, Tavish bellowed loud above the crash of the cascade, "I'm into him!" I looked and even in that dim light saw the point of his rod bent like a bow as the reel whirled. The man himself had his feet set on either side of his razor-edge of a perch, his face was outlined faintly against the farther background of cliff, and he bore his head erect and no longer at a tipsy angle. "It's a fish!" he cried up; "mon, it's a fish!" The emphasis he gave to the fish is not to be conveyed by printers' italics. In a minute or less I had swung up and sprawled down, hanging on to roots and bracken at a venture, had got support for back and feet, and from a point some fifteen feet only above the enraptured MacTavish could watch him and his work with a very fair surplusage of energy to devote to admiration of him and the surprising briskness of his success in doing that which he had been determined to do, at no matter what cost.

For a spell the Black Pool echoed with other noises than the thrashing of the water cast back by that unyield

ing cliff beyond.

"Didna I tell ye?" cried MacTavish. "The little minnow's the laddie for the work! Eh, mon, it's a grand fish! I've had a sight of him and he's a twenty-punder if he's an ounce. Can ye no see how he fetches at the rod? I feel him doon to my very hands, mon. . . . He's dour, but he's a fine fish. I canna stir him." His remarks followed on each other's heels like the bullets of a repeating rifle. To my eyes the Black Pool seemed unconcerned by the adventure going on in its sombre depths, but MacTavish could see the fish whenever he had a mind to do so, until it had got into its dour fit. It rushed about, he said, and it "jumpit" and it came up to ascertain what kind of a man had hooked him, and tried all the dodges of a fish with the spawning instinct and its own powers vigorous in it; and finally it went to the funnelshaped bottom of the pool and lay there. "It kens it's met its master," cried MacTavish. for it, but it's a gey bad spot and theer's no gaff, and how the deevil I'm to work him in and handle him, I'll be damned if I know." My own excitement was less than his, but it was a measurable quantity. "I'll come down somehow," I called to him. "Stay where ye are, mon!" cried he. "I'm telling ye, as sure as death, if ye slip, ye're into it, and there's no soul living 'll land you. Dinna fash; leave him to me. I've never lost a fish since I was a laddie, and I'm not going to lose this one. Mon, but he's dour." "Well, then," I responded, "tell me where your gaff is and I'll fetch it." He had a little play with the salmon ere he replied to that. "Ay," he said then, when he had rapidly wiped his face with his coat-sleeve, "ye might do that. The gaff's in the byre, under the roof. It's short of the handle, but I'll do with it. And ye might go to Rob Macgregor and tell him I want

"I'll get it if I die

him. Eh, but it's a fish. It's eighteen pund, if not twenty. Look at him! Did ye see that?"

Whatever it was to see, I missed it; I was already to the right about, prone on that abominable southern barrier to the Black Pool at its angle of some seventy degrees, the rough foot-holes of which were not even conjecturable in the darkness. From the top of the bank, which was as welcome as water in a wilderness, I shouted an enquiry, but no answer came. And then I took to the woods and little bogs with the beguiling sweet-gale in them, the mossed rock and the rotten timber of years littering it among the bracken, and made first for the cottage of Rob Macgregor, a tawny-bearded heathen who did not go to the kirk on the Sabbath, but spent the day instead mooning about in his braces with a short pipe in his mouth, and on week-days did a mysterious nothing in particular in support of his lean wife and her six small children. Macgregor's cottage lay rather higher up the glen than MacTavish's. It was not a creditable homestead. The younger Macgregors were a bare-legged, ill-kempt crew, mixed up when indoors with a company of sly little snapping roughhaired terriers, hens and their broods and half-concealed gins for vermin, the vermin being without a doubt rabbits for the domestic pot. I had ere this suspected the nefarious nature of MacTavish's

one acknowl

edged friend in the village, but he was so much a wild man of the woods and glens in appearance that one could not exactly blame him for his habits. For once, however, Rob Macgregor was not tempted to exert himself even in misdoing. I tapped twice ere the door opened to show his tawny head and the troubled faces of his offspring behind him. "No," he said, when I told him he was wanted. "I canna

come. I'm no that weel.

Did ye say he's at the Black Pool, sir?" "Are you coming or arn't you?" I retorted. "Deed and he is not," put in the pinched shrill voice of his wife. "At sic an hour! He has his life to think of, sir. What's MacTavish thinking of himself to be doing sic a rash thing? Ye'll get into your bed, Macgregor." "Ay, I wull," said Macgregor. "And the Lord keep his fit from slipping and sliding, brave man though he is. Ay, there's none kens the glen better than MacTavish, but"-I left him wagging his discreet head and made for our own byre, only to have as bad luck with the gaff as with Robert Macgregor. My lighted matches aroused the ire of a retriever bitch with a recent pup, the happy survivor of a family of four, the drowned three of which she had not done mourning. Not for much would I have sought the help of poor Mrs. MacTavish herself in that possible middle period of uncertainty whether she was to begin the new day a wife as before or a widow. After all, it did not seem to matter. MacTavish had never yet landed a salmon in the Black Pool. Sober, he had declared the feat impossible; the fish would go round and round and sink to gain fresh strength to go round and round again, and when at its wits' end it would just bolt for the nether fall, and that would be all. Though MacTavish had never yet lost a hooked fish, he was destined to go through the experience. The gaff were only an aggravation of his risks, for how could he get down to the smooth sheer rocks of the basin to do the crowning work without tumbling in, which it were disagreeable to contemplate? On the whole, it were far best, providential indeed, that neither Macgregor nor the gaff were to be at his service.

And so back to him at the trot through the now inky recesses of the wood. Like the salmon, he was not.