'Deed will I,' said Mrs. Mackinnon cheerfully; 'but Lady Mackenzie will need to wait till the spring should it be the green dye she will be wanting, for the heather will no be fit for dyeing the year, she is that old; indeed, yes, she will be too old.'

6

'Oh, dear, I did not think of that,' said the lady. Of course not. Well, we must have crottal instead. It is a pity; the green is so pretty.'

'Crottal and white will make a bonnie check,' said Mrs. Mackinnon; and so it was settled.

A few other little visits, kindly words, a child to prescribe for, a lassie to encourage, and the laird's wife strolled up the hill track to meet her husband on his way home from stalking. It was a glorious evening: the cloudless sky of pale turquoise colour fainting into an aquamarine green; the summits of the mountains rose-red against it; every corrie, gorge, and distance softest purple and blue. The wife climbed the hill steadily, pausing for breath and to look back on the scene she loved. A flat stone formed an inviting seat. Clach nan Oran lay clustered in the glen; patches of corn and emerald-green cultivation, the burn silver and gold, its banks malachite and purple, with velvety short turf and heather. 'How homely it all looks,' she thought fondly. The words of a tender Gaelic song, in a fresh, young voice, came floating up to where she sat, as a girl drove her black cow down the burn-side.

A wild neigh from a hill pony interrupted Lady Mackenzie's thoughts of her poorer neighbours; and of what she could do to help in several complicated cases which sorely needed help. Her husband came swinging down the hill. Yes, he had had good sport, a fine stag. It was on the pony. Would she come and look at it? And I had a fine crawl after him, I can tell you; and I hope my little woman has a fine dinner for me,' he said, smiling.

She slipped her arm through his, and they went down the hill together.

Now.

A FINE Shooting-lodge stands at the entrance to Glen Oran; very new, very comfortable, all the latest improvements, every kind of laboursaving appliance for the further pampering of underworked, overfed servants; the wild little tossing burn facilitating the installation of electric light, that last cry of civilisation. A trim, well-kept gravel sweep before the hall-door, a few sickly looking, newly planted shrubs in a bed in the centre. At the door, in the full blaze of the morning sunshine, stood a hard-faced woman; shortest of skirts, heaviest of boots, a peaked cap drawn over her pale eyes, a cigarette between her thin red lips.

'I shall use No. 2 rifle to-day,' she said to the stalker.

Take

that one in again. Bring up the pony, you Angus. What are you gaping at?'

Her little terrier sprang up at her, barking joyously. He thought he might perhaps be taken out for a walk. Confound you, get out!' she said irritably, and dealt him a kick with her heavy boot. The little dog gave a piteous yelp, and ran limping into the house, to be given a surreptitious cutlet by the butler, who was discreetly watching the proceedings from the dining-room window. He was a kind man, and loved dogs, and hated Mrs. Maltby, his mistress; and the cutlets were cold and greasy.

'Just look at her!' he said to himself, as the lady in question put her foot in the stirrup and flung her leg across the pony. I calls it indecent, I do. Poor little dog! Fancy kicking a pore dumb little animal with them boots of hers. I believe she 'ave 'urt him badly, the cat,' he said, as the little dog whined and licked his hind leg where the heavy boot had caught him.

The lady proceeded up the glen. Her husband had motored to a town forty miles distant, and she had taken the home beat.

'Hold up, you brute,' she said to her pony, who stumbled over a hidden stone. 'What a bore these beastly ruined crofts are, stones all over the place.'

But where was Clach nan Oran? Where, indeed? Where were the spinners, the weavers, the white-haired bairnies, the fisher lads home from the fishing, the bodachs,' the white-mutched 'cailleachs' 1? Where, where, indeed? And where were the kindly laird and his lady, where was the house where they lived on their lands, and among their people who loved them? Where, indeed? Clach nan Oran was as though it never had been. Heaps of stones where the houses had stood, here and there a decaying roof-tree lying on the ruins of a house. A strong stone bridge for the sole use of the sports people' now spanned the burn. A silence as of death brooded over the scene, broken only by peevish exclamations from the unsexed woman bestriding the pony on the way to her 'sport.' The hoarse cry of an eagle came from out the blue sky, and then Silence and Death reigned once more.

In the glow of the beauteous evening the same party returned. Black was the brow of the lady. She was dog-tired, though she would have died sooner than have owned up to such a condition. She sat heavily on the back of the patient little pony, the stalker and a gillie following, with sullen, dejected faces. Her husband came up the track to meet her. 'Oh, you are back, are you?' she said stupidly. 'No, I have had no luck, and I wounded the confounded beast.' 'Oh, hang it!' he said.

'Oh, we can get him all right enough with the dogs. His hind leg was smashed. I left that fool Angus up there,' she said callously.

Gaelic for old man' and 'old woman.'

'Well, I am sorry for that,' returned her husband. 'Do you know we have not got nearly up to that brute Perkins's weights this year?'

'Yes, I know. Mrs. Perkins was rather nasty about it to me last Sunday. You will have to feed more this winter, Toby."

'Hang it all, do you know what I spent in feed last year?' he said.

'No-what?"

Over one thousand pounds,' he replied.

'Well, you will have to go fifteen hundred pounds this year. That must do the trick. We can't be beat by Perkins.'

This, then, is Now.' Six weeks or so of selfish so-called sport; the whole business of the day in the hands of the stalker; the whole work is his, excepting the pulling of the trigger. Thousands of pounds thrown away on feed to deer-deer on their native hills, where they should find their own sustenance, in order that Maltby's beasts should be heavier and more plentiful than those of Perkins. Clach nan Orans have been swept off the face of the earth, gone are the people, the lairds and the ladies; gone are the sheep. And who is the better? For we cannot pretend to any interest in the doings of Maltbys and Perkinses.

Is not Sandy Ban a more useful and excellent inhabitant of Glen Oran, where he lives year in and year out, making good boots for his neighbours, than Mr. Maltby, who lives in the deserted glen for six weeks, getting all his supplies from the South, his gold benefiting solely the stalkers and gillies, who hate him? And surely is not Mrs. Mackinnon, with her sturdy boys and her loom, more admirable and useful than childless, unsexed Mrs. Maltby, with her cigarettes; foul-mouthed, cruel, and stupid?

But we presume this, too, is Progress.

EVA NAPIER of Magdala.

THE AFTER-DINNER ORATORY

OF AMERICA

THE after-dinner speech of America is framed in a peculiar and distinct reputation of its own. It is a phase of intellectual effort that has no counterpart elsewhere. The popular conception of it existing on this side of the Atlantic associates it with good stories, riant humour, graceful rhetoric, quaint conceits, and a genius for dexterously manipulating and alternating in a brief compass the lighter and graver shades of thought. To reach the accepted standard of American criticism it must have all the choice qualities of Sheridan's dialogue. It must be a gem in prose as one of Austin Dobson's masterpieces is in poetry. It must sparkle and effervesce like the higher brands of champagne. It must be as spontaneous, or, at all events, appear to be as spontaneous, as the irrepressible waters of a mountain spring. The man who labours with an after-dinner speech in Boston or New York is lost. It will not, however, appear surprising that this post-prandial eloquence of America has won for itself a unique fame when it is remembered that amongst those who have frequently responded to the toast-master's call in that country have been such men as Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Colonel John Hay, Edmund Clarence Stedman, William Cullen Bryant, George William Curtis, William Dean Howells, Whitelaw Reid, Charles Dudley Warner, Joseph Hodges Choate, and Chauncey Mitchell Depew. For what a wealth of charming, playful, gossamer fancies these names stand! The very mention of them conjures up delightful visions of festive boards from which a stern decree of outlawry banishes everything hostile to genial friendship, buoyant gaiety, and robust cheerfulness. A random summons to any one of this goodly company never failed to find an expert in the dainty art of illustrating how possible it is that a man may say a wise thing though he say it with a laugh.' And in the case of the men whom I have named, as well as of others whom I might readily cite, their laughter was always healthy, stimulating, and contagious, for the simple reason that the happy humour which provoked the hilarity was never sour nor cynical nor calculated to leave a wound

behind. To these fellows of infinite jest the tribute which Moore paid to the author of The School for Scandal might well be extended

Whose humour, as gay as the fire-fly's light,

Played round every subject and shone as it played,
Whose wit in the combat, as gentle as bright,

Ne'er carried a heart-stain away on its blade.

There is no difficulty in comprehending why a social function which held within itself the power of attracting the presence of men of this stamp should steadily develop into a permanent feature of American life.

on a

It would be an interesting, and probably an entertaining, enterprise to trace systematically the evolution of the after-dinner speech of America. Doubtless there was a time when the accompaniments and surroundings of a public dinner in London and New York were practically alike in their details. However great may have been the difference between the dispositions and constitutional theories of the early Hollanders of the settlement on the Hudson and the incoming New Englanders, and however marked the contrast may have been later on in the same respects between the type that sprung from the union of these two and the stay-at-home Briton, all of them came ultimately to offer a common allegiance to the seductive autocracy of an all-powerful chef. Hollander, New Englander, and Briton alike drifted pacifically and unresistingly to the comforting conclusion that the psychological moment at which human nature found itself best fitted to exalt human virtues, and to extend a sweet forbearance to human weaknesses, followed immediately on generous and ungrudging satisfaction being given to a patient and waiting appetite. It was discovered that at that precise juncture a benign pax vobiscum held sovereign sway. So men came together around a dinner table to do honour to some special or distinguished guest, or to celebrate some conspicuous national event in which the people at large took a legitimate pride. The early fashion on those occasions, on both sides of the Atlantic, was to do justice to a toastlist, which was kept within moderate limits, in speeches, eloquent occasionally but serious at all times. The age then took its responsibilities with greater gravity than ours, I am afraid, is in the habit of doing. Culture had not learned how to disport itself so cunningly as it does nowadays. Hence, even in America, if an orator had the temerity to lean towards anything savouring of levity in proposing, or responding to, a toast such as 'The Day We Celebrate,' or 'The Memory We Honour,' his conduct would be resented with something like the indignation shown by a few over-sensitive American Dutchmen when Washington Irving, masquerading as Diedrich Knickerbocker, published his inimitable History of New York. But 'old times are changed, old manners gone,' as a convenient illustration