CHAPTER II.

"The wild-flowers spring amid the grass,

And many a stone appears,

Carved by affection's memory,

Drench'd with affection's tears."-L. E. L.

IN less than a week, Sir Allan, throughout all the wide domains in which he had, during half a century, reigned as master, was no more missed than an old moon, or a dead sparrow. "His name

was never heard!"

Nearly every figure was changed now on the magic-lantern of life at Clanmarina. The eldest son of Lord Eaglescairn, at all times the most unbrotherly of brothers, being on a cruise on board his own yacht, the Aurora, in the Mediterranean, where he cared for nothing, apparently, but which way the wind blew, wrote a few hurried lines to his father one day, announcing that his brother Tom had died of a fever at Corunna; and he understood from good authority that "Mrs. Tom," as he called her, "the Spanish wife," had now retired inconsolable to the convent of St. Bridget, from which his brother's imprudent and

short-lived marriage had been intended benevolently to rescue her.

Not many months after this intimation, the Marquis of Eaglescairn was thunderstruck at receiving a letter from the captain of his son's yacht, announcing that Lord Iona, the heir of his recently-acquired marquisate, had died of malariafever at Rome, after a few days' illness. If Lord Eaglescairn, when thus left sonless, felt or said that he "richly deserved it," his sufferings under the blow were not of long duration. Having overeaten himself, after being exhausted by a long Popish fast, Lord Eaglescairn suffered a fatal stroke of apoplexy next day; and, soon after, two gorgeous hatchments on the family residence, in Grosvenor Square, announced the total extinction of that branch which he represented in the ancient tree of De Bathe. Lord Eaglescairn, in his last moments, had frantically called for his solicitor, and spoken in almost delirious accents of a letter from his son Tom, whom he adjured to write once more, to tell him all, and not yet to despair of his pardon; but the servants, to whose care he was committed, paid no attention to what they considered the ravings of fever, till at length the scene of mental and bodily suffering closed in death.

Very distant indeed was the cousin who now

On

emerged from obscurity to succeed to the ancient family of Eaglescairn. The new Peer had begun life as a rollicking barrister in London, celebrated for his eloquence and ready wit in the courts of law; but a brilliant speech of his, on a question connected with Church affairs, having failed to gain the cause he advocated, Mr. De Bathe became disgusted with the world, and, in an impulse of pique at not being able to carry the Church his own way, he quarrelled with it altogether, suddenly associated himself with the Jesuits, and retired to one of their institutions near Bath. the death of Lord Eaglescairn, he left Prior Park, to assume the high position which now so unexpectedly awaited him; and, as there is nothing people become so soon accustomed to as good fortune, the new lord soon felt as if he had never been otherwise than Lord Eaglescairn. The gossipping world continued to exclaim, with ceaseless wonder, at the extraordinary vicissitudes of fortune in the family of Eaglescairn, long after the innkeepers had substituted the new peer's portrait for that of the old one over the alehouse door, and long after the new lord had ceased to wonder at all.

Accompanied by the Spanish Jesuit, Father Eustace now his appointed confessor, by another priest "his director," and by a detachment of miscellaneous priests from Prior Park College, the

new Earl of Eaglescairn proceeded to take immediate possession of Eaglescairn Castle. His Countess, very bigoted and unapproachably deaf, accompanied him there, as she had returned from abroad, to preside for life over the priestly establishment. Contrary to the Jesuit principles which he admired, the new peer had been tempted into marrying a beautiful but silly wife, who had gone abroad with their only son, now Lord Iona.

If the Papists be right in considering it a crime to marry, as well as to read the Bible, Lord Eaglescairn had done penance through life for having committed it, as the beauty of his bride soon vanished in his estimation, and her silliness seemed daily to increase, though it found an ample vent abroad, in attending all the gorgeous processions and image worship of Rome, to which, with her sister-in-law, Lady Stratharden, who believed herself still a Protestant, she became most ardently devoted.

At Clanmarina a Popish chapel was immediately reared, large enough to contain much more than double the population of the entire hamlet; where the ignorant villagers were summoned, several times a-day, to hear Latin prayers inaudibly muttered, and where they learned only the bodily exercise which profiteth nothing, to wear scapulars round their necks, to kneel before a wooden image

of St. Benedict, and to count their beads, amidst a perfect toy-shop of trifles and trinkets, relics and rosaries. No rational education, nor intellectual piety, accompanied the injunctions laid on these poor deluded peasants to buy expensive indulgences and perform laborious penances, both of which combined to keep them in hopeless degradation of mind, as well as in most thoroughly pillaged poverty.

Face to face, though several miles apart, the towers of Cairngorum Castle overlooked those of Eaglescairn; and two more noble residences could scarcely have rivalled each other throughout the Highlands. Opposed in both religion and politics, the two families had for centuries lived and died on terms of the very barest civility. The new Chief of McAlpine, Sir Evan, when he left the 93d regiment, regretted and respected to the utmost pitch of human reverence by every officer and by every private in the corps, seemed more unlikely than any of his predecessors to amalgamate with a representative of the narrow-minded and bigoted old Earls of Eaglescairn who had evidently inherited all the gloomy superstition and austere ideas of his ancestors. Yet the chief made a proper distinction between families in which the Romanism was hereditary, like some oldestablished Papists around, and those, like Lord