tion of seeing that our pursuers, after lingering for a little while on the spot on which we had left them, turned homewards, fairly cowed, and pursued us no more. But, alas! on reaching our secret chamber, we ascertained, by marks all too unequivocal, that it was to be secret no longer. Some rude hand had torn down the wooden lining, and cut two of the posts half through with a hatchet; and on returning disconsolately to the town, we ascertained that Johnstone, the forester, had just been there before us, declaring that some atrociously wicked persons-for whose apprehension a proclamation was to be instantly issued-had contrived a diabolical trap, which he had just discovered, for maiming the cattle of the gentleman, his employer, who farmed the Hill. Johnstone was an old Forty-Second man, who had followed Wellington over the larger part of the Peninsula; but though he had witnessed the storming and sack of St. Sebastian, and a great many other bad things, nothing had he ever seen on the Peninsula, or anywhere else, he said, half so mischievous as the cattle-trap. We, of course, kept our own secret; and as we all returned under the cloud of night, and with heavy hearts filled up our excavation level with the soil, the threatened proclamation was never issued. Johnstone, however, who had been watching my motions for a considerable time before, and whom, as he was a formidable fellow, very unlike any of the other foresters, I had been sedulously watching in turn,-had no hesitation in declaring that I, and I only, could be the designer of the cattle-trap. I had acquainted myself in books, he said, with the mode of entrapping by pitfalls wild beasts in the forests abroad; and my trap for the Colonel's cattle was, he was certain, a result of my book-acquired knowledge.

I was one day lounging in front of my mother's dwelling, when up came Johnstone to address me. As the evidence regarding the excavation had totally broken down, I was aware of no special offence at the time that could have secured for me such a piece of attention, and inferred that the old soldier was laboring under some mistake; but Johnstone's address soon evinced that he was not in the least mistaken.

He wished to be acquainted with me, he said. "It was all nonsense for us to be bothering one another, when we had no cause of quarrel." He used occasionally to eke out his pension, and his scanty allowance as forester, by catching a basket of fish for himself from off the rocks of the Hill; and he had just discovered a projecting rock at the foot of a tall precipice, which would prove, he was sure, one of the best fishing platforms in the Frith. But then, in the existing state, it was wholly inaccessible. He was, however, of opinion that it was possible to lay it open by carrying a path adown the shelving face of the precipice. He had seen Wellington address himself to quite as desperate-looking matters in the Peninsula; and were I but to assist him, he was sure, he said, we could construct between us the necessary path. The undertaking was one wholly according to my own heart; and next morning Johnstone and I were hard at work on the giddy brow of the precipice. It was topped by a thick bed of boulder clay, itself-such was the steepness of the slope-almost a precipice; but a series of deeply-cut steps led us easily adown the bed of clay; and then a sloping shelf, which, with much labor, we deepened and flattened, conducted us not unsafely some five-and-twenty or thirty feet along the face of the precipice proper. A second series of steps, painfully scooped out of the living rock, and which passed within a few yards of a range of herons' nests perched on a hitherto inaccessible platform, brought us down some five-and-twenty or thirty feet more; but then we arrived at a sheer descent of about twenty feet, at which Johnstone looked rather blank, though, on my suggesting a ladder, he took heart again, and cutting two slim taper trees in the wood above, we flung them over the preci pice into the sea; and then fishing them up with a world of toil and trouble, we squared and bore them upwards, and, cutting tenons for them in the hard gneiss, we placed them against the rock front, and nailed over them a line of steps. The precipice beneath sloped easily on to the fishing rock, and so a few steps more completed our path. I never saw a man more delighted than Johnstone. As being lighter and more active

than he,-for, though not greatly advanced in life, he was considerably debilitated by severe wounds,-I had to take some of the more perilous parts of the work on myself. I had cut the tenons for the ladder with a rope round my waist, and had recovered the trees flung into the sea by some adroit swimming; and the old soldier became thoroughly impressed with the conviction that my proper sphere was the army. I was already five feet three, he said; in little more than a twelvemonth I should be five feet seven; and were I then but to enlist, and to keep from the "drop drink," a thing which he never could do,—I would, he was certain, rise to be a serjeant. In brief, such were the terms on which Johnstone and I learned to live ever after, that, had I constructed a score of traps for the Colonel's cattle, I believe he would have winked at them all. Poor fellow! he got into difficulties a good many years after, and, on the accession of the Whigs to power, mortgaged his pension, and emigrated to Canada. Deeming the terms hard, however, as he well might, he first wrote a letter to his old commander, the Duke of Wellington,—I holding the pen for him,—in which, in the hope that their stringency might be relaxed in his behalf, he stated both his services and his case. And promptly did the Duke reply, in an essentially kind holograph epistle, in which, after stating that he had no influence at the time with the Ministers of the Crown, and no means of getting a relaxation of their terms in behalf of any one, he “ earnestly recommended William Johnstone, first, not to seek a provision for himself in Canada, unless he were able-bodied, and fit to provide for himself in circumstances of extreme hardship; and, second, on no account to sell or mortgage his pension." But the advice was not taken ;-Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension; and I fear-though I failed to trace his af ter-history-that he suffered in consequence.

CHAPTER VIII.

"Now, surely, thought I, there's enou'
To fill life's dusty way;

And who will miss a poet's feet,

Or wonder where he stray!

So to the woods and wastes I'll go,

And I will build an ozier bower;

And sweetly there to me shall flow
The meditative hour."

HENRY KIRKE WHITE.

FINLAY was away; my friend of the Doocot Cave was away; my other companions were all scattered abroad; my mother, after a long widowhood of more than eleven years, had entered into a second marriage; and I found myself standing face to face with a life of labor and restraint. The prospect appeared dreary in the extreme. The necessity of ever toiling from morning to night, and from one week's end to another, and all for a little coarse food and homely raiment, seemed to be a dire one; and fain would I have avoided it. But there was no escape, and so I determined on being a mason. I remembered my Cousin George's long winter holidays, and how delightfully he employed them; and, by making choice of Cousin George's profession, I trusted to find, like him, large compensation, in the amusements of one half the year, for the toils of the other half. Labor shall not wield over me, I said, a rod entirely black, but a rod like one of Jacob's peeled wands, chequered white and black alternately.

I, however, did look, even at this time, notwithstanding the antecedents of a sadly mis-spent boyhood, to something higher than mere amusement; and, daring to believe that literature, and, may hap, natural science, were, after all, my proper vocations, I resolved that much of my leisure time should be given to careful observation, and the study of our best English authors. Both my uncles, especially James, were sorely vexed by my determination to be a mason; they had expected to see me rising in some one of the learned professions; yet here was I going to be a mere operative mechanic, like one of themselves! I spent with them a serious hour, in which they urged that, instead of entering as a mason's apprentice, I should devote myself anew to my education. Though the labor of their hands formed their only wealth, they would assist me, they said, in getting through college; nay, if I preferred it, I might meanwhile come and live with them; all they asked in return of me was, that I should give myself as sedulously to my lessons as, in the event of my becoming a mason, I would have to give myself to my trade. I demurred. The lads of my acquaintance who were preparing for college had an eye, I said, to some profession; they were qualifying themselves to be lawyers, or medical men, or, in much larger part, were studying for the Church; whereas I had no wish and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread, unless one could honestly regard one's self as called to the Church's proper work; and I could not. There, said my uncles, you are perfectly right: better be a poor mason,—better be anything honest, however humble,-than an uncalled minister. How very strong the hold taken of the mind in some cases by hereditary convictions of which the ordinary conduct shows little apparent trace! I had for the last few years been a wild boy,—not without my share of respect for Donald Roy's religion, but possessed of none of Donald's scriousness; and yet here was his belief in this special matter lying so strongly entrenched in the recesses of my mind, that no consideration whatever could have induced me to outrage