the wind. He glanced behind him at the mansion woodily recessed - his ancient proper home,-got off the horse, inhaled the salty perfume of the tide on the wracky beaches, then passed through the seapinks to the shore, where he stripped a sunburnt body behind the shelter of a rock, and walked to the edge of the bay, and stood a moment with his arms held high, his eyes ecstatic on the far horizon. A moment later he was breasting the waves, swimming with mighty strokes, the seaweeds trailing across his lips, the salt spray in his nostrils. CHAPTER II. In Schawfield village one funeral pall of thick black velvet, heavily fringed, did duty at our funerals for two hundred years, so that velvet, like the lilies of Lent which, till latter years, we saw in kirkyards only, is ever associated in our minds with mortuary sentiments. The books of the kirk-session still bear record how Quinten Hogg, a vintner and an elder, going on a jaunt to Edinburgh, was commissioned there to buy "twenty ells, with fringe and tassels conform, for the common town's use, inasmuch as the old mort-cloth is sore motheaten and abused." But, twenty years ago, in revolt against the charges of the session for a pall that had long since earned its cost, some thrifty folk in Schawfield started a Mort-cloth Fund, and bought a rival pall, which lowered so much the cost of obsequies that death, in the words of pawky Cooper Leckie, was almost popular. "And quite right, too; we must be movin' wi' the times," said Mrs Nish of the Schawfield Arms, till the oraze for economy in the shows of grief began to threaten her monopoly of the hearse, and then she was all the antiquary-for old times, old manners, and the mort-cloth in which the lairds and all the ancient people of blood had been happed at last without regard for a half-guinea more or less. Her hearse in its day had been the glory of the parish. Golden angels romping among golden clouds played cheerfullooking post-horns upon every panel; great ostrich plumes cooked and nodded upon the top of it, like Highland soldiers' bonnets; and texts like "So passeth away all earthly glory" were in the Latin tongue on sorolls upon its gables. It was the only funeral waggon (except the poor man's cart) for more than thirty miles, and its engagement called for a certain ritual of bargaining, since the cost of its hire depended upon things that might seem quite irrelevant - as the season, or the price of wool or oats, the social plane of the departed, or the money he had left-the latter only open to conjecture. A man with a melancholy eye, and his natural voice restrained to a pious whisper, would come into the inn at gloaming, lean over the zinc of the tiny bar, and mournfully ask for a glass of spirits. The landlady would sigh her sympathy as she turned the faucet over the half-gill stoup, and poutering her bosom like a dove, till the stone-work of her necklet went like a mason's yard, would indicate that all was known to her,-the peaceful ending and the very hour of it, the last words, and the doctor's diagnosis. Then the bereaved, with short despondent sips at the glass, as one for ever henceforth indifferent to earthly appetites, -"Ay, Mrs Nish, he was a game ane, but he's gane, and that's the lang and the short o't. Slipped awa' at an awkward time for us, wi' the hay no' out and the weather broken. Forbye, we lost a calf in the dam last week,-a maist unlucky summer! Poor John!" "Here we have no abidin' city," and the dewlaps would be wagging like a barn-fowl's wattles. "Your uncle was an honest man, and it's aye a consolation that he died respected. I wouldna' wonder but ye'll want the hearse?" "I wouldna' say but we might; the guidwife kind o' mentioned it. I think it's pomp and vanity mysel', and Uncle John was a man o' nae pretences: the cart would suit him fine. There's nae great grandeur called for wi' a man's remains." "Deed no! At the best we're a wheen o' worms!" "As regular as the clock! She used to say she could boil the kettle on him. And he was aye that fond o' you! His wife, ye mind, was your husband's second cousin. What did ye say about the hearse?" "It would be fifteen shillings; is the mistress well?" The bereaved, with a dramatio start, "My God! mem, fifteen shillin's! David Watson's widow last week paid but ten, they're tellin' me." "I'm no' denyin' 't, but ye see she was a widow, for widows it's always ten; puir things! it's their only consolation. After this fashion haggled the customers for Mrs Nish's hearse: her long experience had given her the skill to guess, in the first few sentences of such an interview, within a shilling or two of what was a proper fee for the vehicle; only once or twice had she given the bereaved her lowest terms, to be shocked a little later at the news of handsome legacies. "Folks 'll get an awfu' surprise when I die," said Makum Ross, the merchant, to her slyly, once; he was a miser whose aim in life was to die worth fifteen hundred, which, for his sins (that, like all the worst of sins, had cost him nothing) he meant to bequeath to the Free Church. "You'll maybe get an awfu' surprise yoursel', Makum,' said Mrs Nish, with sinister meaning. "Dod! she's sharp in the tongue, but I'll hae repartee for her yet," he had remarked, chagrined, as he left her presence, attended by the wild guffaws of farmers in for a wool market, and he had the laugh against her at the end, if a sense of humour goes with middling honest Scottish merchants to the shades. When he died his sister came to the inn. "Makum and you were aye good frien's; he thought the world o' ye," she said to Mrs Nish, who hated to do business with her sex. "A worthy gentleman!" said the landlady, "ye'll miss him sore, but ye have aye the consolation that he died respected. Ye'll be ettlin' on the hearse; I'm glad it's just been newly painted. I never saw it look so braw,-five books o' genuine gold Willie Crombie took to the cherubim and seraphim, and ye never 8&w such trumpets!" "It wasna' the hire o' the hearse I ca'd about," said Makum's sister, with a bitter woman's satisfaction, "it's an awfu' pity about his will, every penny to the kirk, but a hundred pounds for a parish hearse to be kept for the use o' a' and sundry by the Mortcloth Fund!" So passed away the glory of Mrs Nish's hearse: its rival out her prices down to the cost of plain post-hiring, and would have driven the seraphim and the cherubim completely from the field if it had not been a hearse of startling new design, with no black plumes, and sides of glass, which made a burial "far mair melancholious than there was ony need to be," as some of the natives said, who were used to obsequies where the leading role was not so ostentatious. "It's makin' a parade o' the departed! And there was something nice and cheery in the look o' the golden angels wi' their trumps," said they. Fat days then for the Mortcloth Fund! Its revenues accumulated till they became a kind of incubus, which was finally made less on one occasion by a Mort - cloth Ball. Behold the folk of Schawfield jigging, then, in Mrs Nish's hostelry. Watty Fraser with his fiddle, perched high in the nook of the big bow-window, shut his eyes, and pumped with ecstasy from the unseen source of the music that bubbles and gleams eternally about the world: 'twas as if he tickled the young girl Joy, and made her laugh. The floor rocked under the mighty tread of the country dance and the beat of the strathspey. A velvet pall should have been hung for banner under the chandelier, memento mori,the innocent cause of all this gaiety, but Schawfield had its sense of the proprieties; it called the dance the Jubilee Celebration, and the pall was absent, in the darkness of its kist within the vestry of the silent kirk, under the mourning 'I never saw her equal at unforgetting trees. Play up then, Watty! another dance; give us "The Miller o' Dron or "The Wind that shakes the Barley"; landlady, make the old mell gurgle, and send in another bowl; are we not young? and it is long till morning. In a little room behind the bar, to which the scuffle of the dance and the stampede of the young men charging across the floor for partners came like gusty rumours of the sea each time the door was opened to let in another loaded tray, four or five worthies sat, too fat, old, or sedate for dancing, doing their best to lower the credit side of the Mort-cloth treasurer's intromissions. "That's right, Johnny! be always comin' in with it in quantities; it'll no' go wrang," said Fleming of Clashgour, the farmer, whose bosom ever swelled, and whose interest in another world than that of nowt and sheep invariably awoke at the sound of jingling glasses. "Man! there's one thing vexes me," said Jamie Birrell, the Writer, plowtering with his toddy - ladle, and his rosy face all glistening. "It's that the Captain's such a recent widower; he would have fair delighted in the evening's entertainment." "I havena' seen him dance since he was married," said the banker. "The last time we saw him shake a jovial leg was at his home - comin', when he led the Grand March and Triumph wi' his cook. an entrée,' said he, with another fling-though it's known very well he could live on brose himsel' if his frien's were well set up in dainties; and he waited on her at the supper like a titled lady." "Makin' her mighty blate and ashamed o' hersel'," added the lawyer. "That's the worst o' Sir Andrew's democratic cantrips; they're well meant, but oursedly embarrassing to the folk he plays them on. The cook would have been better pleased wi' a touslin' frae the gardener. But what can ye make o' the selfsame gentleman? He's droll, and that's the lang and the short o't" ("droll," in Schawfield, signifying something approaching amiable lunacy). wasn't droll there wouldn't be all this surplush in the Mortcloth Fund, and we wouldn't be having our ordinar' Friday night sederunt spoiled by idiots posturin' to Watty Fraser's old birch fiddle." "If he ha! that's a good one!" rumbled into convulsive laughter at the notion of the laird signalising his release from the wrong wife by a ball. "Not exactly, Mr Divvert, not exactly," said the lawyer drily. "The circumstances would scarcely warrant that with strict propriety. To let you know, his wife peace with her died some months ago, and, as baronets most properly pay more for their burials than common folk, there was a sudden augmentation of the Mort cloth Fund that only such an occasion as this could restore to its old sufficient and safe balance in the Union Bank. Do you take me, Mr Divvert-do you take me?" "That shows ye don't ken Captain Cut-Sir Andrewnor his story," said the lawyer, "and that ye don't ken Schawfield very well either, or ye would know that there's little chance of any rumour reaching Sir Andrew that would vex him. By the blessing of God, it's the semijubilee year of the Mort-cloth Fund, and ye're expected to assume that it's that we're celebrating. Not that the the Captain's feelings need on this occasion be very scrupulously considered, for the death of his poor departed in the the spring was of the nature of "I have never heard a word of it," said the schoolmaster. "Of course not," agreed the lawyer. "It's quite between ourselves in Schawfield, — a kind of family affair,-and I trust it will go no further." "I'm nothing if not disoreet, the dominie assured him, so eager for the story that he choked on the first honest gulp he had made at his toddyglass. "There was a time, two or three years ago, yonder," said the lawyer, settling back in his chair, "when two sisters, daughters of an Indian officer, came for a month to a lodge that's over the way by Whitfarland, with their father. Jardynes they were calledLucy and Jean Davinia. I'm no great judge of the sex myself, but here's our friend Clashgour, he's made them a kind o' a speciality. What do ye say, Clashgour |