I hit out with all my might.

The effect was magical.

There was a loud roar of pain, and away galloped the midnight marauders, in a wild and startled stampede.

And who were they after all? Why, only a couple of young steers, who had been chewing a bath towelone at one end, the other at the other-that Foley had left hanging under the van.

Such then are some of the humours of an amateur gipsy's life.

"Come clad in your steel jack,
Your war gear in order,
And down hew or drive back

The Scots o'er the border."-Old Ballad.

TELL you what it is, my boy," said a well-known London editor to me one day, shortly before I started on my long tour in the Wanderer," I tell you what it is, you'll never do it."

He was standing a little way off my caravan as he spoke, so as to be able to take her all in, optically, and his head was cocked a trifle to one side, consideringly.

"Why?"

"Why? First, because a two-ton caravan is too much for even two such horses as you have, considering the hills you will have to encounter; and, secondly," he added with a sly smile, "because Scotchmen never 'gang back.'”

I seized that little world-wise editor just above the elbow. He looked beseechingly up at me.

"Let go!" he cried; "your fingers are made of iron fencing; my arm isn't."

"Can you for one moment imagine," I said, "what the condition of this England of yours would be were all the Scotchmen to be suddenly taken out of it; suddenly to disappear from great cities like Manchester and Liverpool, from posts of highest duty in London itself, from the Navy, from the Army, from the Volunteers? Is the bare idea not calculated to induce a more dreadful nightmare than even a lobster salad?"

"I think," said the editor, quietly, as I released him, "we might manage to meet the difficulty."

But despite the dark forebodings of my neighbours and the insinuations of this editor, here I am in bonnie Scotland.

"My foot is on my native heath,

And my name is—"

Well, the reader knows what my name is.

I have pleasant recollections of my last day or two's drive in Northumberland north, just before entering my native land.

Say from the Blue Bell Hotel at Belford. What a stir there was in that pretty little town, to be sure!

We were well out of it, because I got the Wanderer brought to anchor in an immensely large stack-yard. There was the sound of the circus's brass band coming from a field some distance off, the occasional whoopla! of the merry-go-rounds and patent-swing folks, and the bang-banging of rifles at the itinerant shooting galleries; but that was all there was to disturb us.

I couldn't help thinking that I never saw brawnier, wirier men than those young farmers who met Earl Pat his political meeting.

I remember being somewhat annoyed at having to start in a procession of gipsy vans, but glad when we got up the hill, and when Pea-blossom and Corn-flower gave them all the slip.

Then the splendid country we passed through; the blue sea away on our right; away to the left the everlasting hills! The long low shores of the Holy Isle flanked by its square-towered castle. It is high water while we pass, and Lindisfarne is wholly an island.

66

Stay, coachman, stay; let us think; let us dream ; let us imagine ourselves back in the days of long, long ago. Yonder island, my Jehu John, which is now so peacefully slumbering 'neath the midday sun, half shrouded in the blue mist of distance, its lordly castle only a shape, its priory now hidden from our view

'The castle with its battled walls,

The ancient monastery's halls,

Yon solemn, huge, and dark-red pile,
Placed on the margin of the isle'

-have a history, my gentle Jehu, far more worthy

of being listened to than any romance that has ever been conceived or penned.

"Aidan the Christian lived and laboured yonder ; from his home in that lone, surf-beaten island scintillated, as from a star, the primitive rays of our religion of love."

Jehu John (loquitur): "Excuse me, sir, but that is all a kind o' Greek to me."

"Knowest thou not, my gentle John, that more than a thousand years ago that monastery was built there, that

Hast never heard of St. Cuthbert?

"No, sir; can't say as ever I has."

"John John! John! But that wondrous, that 'mutable and unreasonable saint' dwelt yonder, nor after death did he rest, John, but was seen by many in divers places and at divers times in this kingdom of Britain the Great! Have you never heard the legend that he sailed down the Tweed in a huge stone coffin?

"Ha! ha! I can't quite swallow that, sir."

"That his figure may even until this day be seen, that