IN FAR LOCHABER.

CHAPTER I.

IN FETTERS.

KIRK O' SHIELDS, a small town in Lanarkshire, that all the week long was a roaring pandemonium of noise and fire and steam engines shrieking, boiler - works hammering, blasts and furnaces belching forth red flame into the heavy, smoke-laden atmosphere-sank of a Sunday into a sudden and unnatural quiet, that seemed to deepen and deepen as the slow hours of the afternoon dragged by and darkness and the night came down. And nowhere was the silence more marked and impressive than in the Minister's parlor, whence all worldly thoughts and cares and interests were supposed to be scrupulously banished, and the evening, after the active services of the day, given over to silent reading and meditation. On this particular Sabbath night there were three persons in the hushed little room, all of them absorbed in their pious task; and not a sound was audible beyond the occasional turning over of a leaf, or perhaps (for human nature is frail, and the time passed slowly) a bit of a half-concealed sigh from one of the girls. The Minister himself sate in the big easychair by the fireplace, the family Bible spread open on his knees, his head slightly inclined forward, his two hands partly supporting the ponderous volume. He was rather a small man, of pronounced and stern features; his forehead deeply lined; his dark gray eyes, set under bushy eyebrows, usually expressing a profound and habitual melancholy, though at times they were capable of flashing forth a fire of resentment or indignation. Suffering had left its traces on this worn and furrowed face, but the res

ignation of the Christian was there as well. If the heavy brows, the keen nostrils, the strong upper lip and still stronger under lip, showed determination, not to say doggedness, of will, the deepset, unutterably sad gray eyes were those of a man who had come through much tribulation, and had brought himself to accept these trials as the discipline of an all-wise and merciful Father.

Of the two daughters who were seated at the table, both with books before them, the elder, Alison by name, was a young woman of eighteen or nineteen, of pale complexion, clear gray eyes with dark eyelashes, and smoothly braided dark brown hair. A calm intelligence and a sufficient self-possession were visible in her shapely forehead and well-cut mouth; but at this moment the ordinary bright and friendly scrutiny of her eyes had given way to an absent look as she leaned forward over her reading. Perhaps she saw but little of the printed page before her. In church that morning, after the introductory psalm had been sung, the Minister had advanced to the front of the pulpit and made the brief announcement: "The prayers of this congregation are requested for a young woman about to enter upon a long journey;" and the protracted and earnest and curiously personal appeal that followed for Divine protection and loving-kindness and guardianship was known by all the people present to be made on behalf of the Minister's own daughter, Alison Blair. And now, despite the strict exclusion of all worldly things from the meditations of the Sabbath evening, perhaps there were visions before those mild, clear, calm gray eyes. On the morrow Alison Blair was going away into an unknown country.

The younger sister, Agnes, was of the same complexion as Alison, but there was less decision of character in her refined and gentle face. Her large eyes were wistful, the mouth sensitive even to sadness, and her delicate features looked all the more ethereal that they were set about by faintly straw-colored hair that even sunlight could hardly have made to shimmer into gold. And if in this noiseless small room there were visions also before her eyes, they were visions of no earthly country or earthly pilgrimage. Her favorite reading was the Book of Revelation, and she did not tire of it; for where was the limit to her far-reaching dreams of the new heaven and the new earth, the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband? Nay, in this profound stillness could she not hear some distant

murmur, as coming from the wide and wonderful spaces that were visible to her mental eyes? On these Sabbath evenings Kirk o' Shields lay silent in the darkness, as if stricken by the hand of death. But in the mystical and shining far regions that she beheld were there no sounds that could come faintly towards an intently listening ear, across the starlit deeps of the sky? And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready. And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints." Kirk o' Shields, and all its squalor and din and wretchedness, were forgotten in these entranced dreams; she beheld a great multitude, arrayed in shining robes, and singing, as it were, a new song. "And sung as it were a new song before the throne, and before the four beasts, and the elders: and no man could learn that song but the hundred and forty and four thousand, which were redeemed from the earth." And in her fanciful way she listened, and still listened, and seemed to hear, as the hushed halfhours went by.

"Alison," said the Minister, happening to look up," what book is that ye're reading?"

The sudden breaking of the deep silence startled the girl, but she answered the question, naming a well-known Sunday magazine, a bound volume of which lay before her on the table.

"I thought as much," said the Minister, with a brief sigh of resignation, and he returned to his Bible.

But the next moment he had looked up again, and in the deepset gray eyes there was an angry glow of indignation.

"And a fine thing it is," he said, with a resentment that was none the less bitter that it was uttered in slow and measured tones—“a fine thing it is to bring novels and romances into a God-fearing family under the guise of reading fitted for the Sabbath-day-ay, and ministers of the Gospel not ashamed to lend their names to such a practice. But the Enemy of Mankind has inseedious ways and means; he'll take servants where he can get them, even if they're just come down from the pulpit; and little does the Reverend This or the Reverend That think whose work

he is about when he is passing perneecious and soul-destroying leeterature into honest households. It's not enough that the frivolous and idle and worldly should steep their minds in that poison; the remnant of Israel, that have been trying to keep the Lord's Day pure and sanctified to His name, they must be induced to drink also, and by his own appointed servants. His servants? the Devil's servants I call them: purveyors of lying, what else can they be? The worship of lying-that is a strange worship to be seen among men. And look at the altars the poor, blind, deluded creatures are proud to raise! Look at the monument in Prince's Street of Edinburgh, and the monument in George's Square in Glasgow, to the Great Liar! Grand monuments they are-braw monuments they are-raising their tall column into the skies, and saying to every one that passes by, 'This is the man the nation delighteth to honor! Honor for the Greatest Liar-that is the new worship on the face of God's earth. But of one thing, lass, you may be sure that when the Lord's persecuted people were being driven from moor to moss, and from glen to hill-side, scattered here and hewn down there by the bloody dragoons-scarcely daring to lift up their voices in prayer and supplication lest their pursuers should overtake and overwhelm them-they little thought or cared whether they should be made a by-word and a jest for the amusement of the Edinburgh lawyers and their fine leddies and misses. They knew that the flame in their hearts was of the Lord's kindling; they knew that their blood, spilt on the heather, would not be spilt in vain. The Scotland of this day is a degenerate country surely if she doesna bethink her of what she owes to the martyrs of the Covenant." He paused for a second or two; his eyes lost their fire and resumed their ordinary expression of profound and resigned sadness. "And yet I wonder," he said, slowly, "what old Adam Blair of Moss-end would have thought if he could have foreseen the time when preachers of the Gospel, ordained ministers of the Church of Christ, would connive at making novel-reading a pastime in believing families-ay, and what he would have thought could he have foreseen one of his own name and lineage busy with such work on a Sabbath evening."

"I was not reading the story, father," Alison said, gently; "but I will go and get another book."

Softly she stole away to her own little room up-stairs. She