"I would'na say that; na, na. It may only be a student; an' Marget Dundas micht na think it necessary to put in a fire for him." Leeby, as a skilled detective, might have given points to any of Gaboriau's experts-to Lecocq or the Père Tabouret. The minister has married a fine Edinburgh lady, and brought her to the renovated manse. The bride kindly patronizes the shy girl, who dares scarcely lift her eyes or stir hand or foot. Leeby comes home to brighten the chair-ridden invalid with an exact inventory of all the furniture and critical remarks on the ingenious shifts which have been patching carpets and turning old gasbrackets into gasaliers. And it would be a mistake to fancy that the Lichts of Thrums did not punctiliously attend to their manners or regard social distinctions. When guests were entertained, it was always etiquette to let them chap at a door which generally stood open. Of course they professed they had no appetite before setting to work in all seriousness. A pudding for supper was the proof of high gentility, and when a milk jug was seen abroad at an unseasonable hour, it was a sign that the neighbor was receiving company. Jess never took more trouble with the best company manners of herself and her spouse than when expecting the billsticker of Tilliedrum and his lady. To be sure, Mrs. Billsticker carried her gentility so far that she cut her husband dead when she met him abroad with his paste-pot and brushes. A less lucky sister looked up to her with pride, though she recognized that "Margaret was grand by me," as she had a bell and a bakehouse of her own; but yet the worm would turn at times, as when Tibbie was not bid to the laying out of the defunct bill sticker. For the lower Scotch take a morbid pride and delight in the melancholy details of death and burial, witness the scenes in the "Antiquary" and the "Bride of Lammermoor." Even Tammas, the professed humorist of the town-whose conceptions of humor are quaint and most delightfully original-must have owned he was mistaken in denying that humor might be found in anything or everything had he read Mr. Barrie's book. For some of the best of the dry fun is associated with the last offices of the death-chamber, with the sextonbedral who howks the graves, and with the carpenter who makes the coffins. No one who had not been brought up in the society could have reproduced the picturesque vulgarity of the homely speech with such inimitable fidelity. There may be a world of meaning in an ejaculation, and the meaning varies widely with the enunciation. Look at the eloquence of Tibbie Mealmaker's "Ou!" when it punctuates the end of a plaint with a whole constellation of significant full stops. Or at Jess's "Ay, I'm sure of that,” which clenches an argument or emphasizes a point. An exquisite tenderness of sympathy underlies the book, so that it is difficult to distinguish the pathos from the drollery. The struggling weavers of Thrums, fighting the world from day to day on poor earnings, and living hardly from hand to mouth, have no leisure to indulge the finer sentiments. But the feelings are the more intense from the habit of repression. When hearts are breaking and the emotions are exceptionally overwrought, the habit of stolid endurance will give way, and even God may be forgotten or blasphemed in some uncontrollable outbreak. Yet, as Tammas complained that the drawback to his humorous vein was that he was sorely tempted to laugh aloud in church, so Mr. Barrie often provokes a smile when we are almost ready to weep. There is an undercurrent of solemn tragedy through the book, and the lights of the Window at the last are painfully extinguished. Jess's fond and jealous motherhood that even grudged a good wife to her darling; Leeby's sisterly devotion, the effusive demonstrations of which had scandalized her brother, and the fatherly pride of the self-contained Hendry, are all destined to lead up to a disastrous dénouement, with the moral that the unselfish may have to seek their recompense in the future life. Mr. Barrie is at his best when his foot is on the cobble-paving of Thrums and when confining himself to the actualities of his experience. In "When a Man's Single," linking Thrums to London, he follows the fortunes of a speculative young journalist. But the magic transformation of the sturdy Glen Quharity saw-miller taxes credulity too far. It reminds us of the extravagance of Lever's "Con Cregan," where the untaught Irish boy leaves the brogue in his bogs, acquires the polish of an accomplished man of the world, and, talking French like a Parisian and Spanish like a Castilian, holds his own with diplomatists, and weds with a blueblooded countess. Mr. Barrie, as we suspect, rather wishes such things might be than believes that they are. The raw Angusshire material cannot be spun so easily into glossy broadcloth and cut into the fashionable frock which will pass muster in any society. Rob Angus wins the heart of a refined and sensitive girl of birth and breeding. That is possible, for Titania was enamoured of Bottom. But the lady's brother, the English public schoolboy, would be the least likely of all persons to welcome the mésalliance, even though the man who had victoriously tossed the caber at Thrums could make play, like Samson, with ponderous field-gates. Mr. Barrie knows his own world well; when he goes beyond it he is groping for fancies in a Forfarshire mist. So it is that he spoiled his "Little Minister" by gratuitously introducing the fantastic. The fair gypsy who is ne minister's Delilah or Circe is a creature simply inconceivable. Had her eccentricities been credible, the catastrophe must have come off prematurely, and the novel been compressed into the shortest of stories, for the eyes of all the keen-sighted Auld Lichts were watching the minister's outgoings and incomings. As for Lord Rintoul, with his wild caprice and high-handed proceedings, he is a travestied survival of the feudal baron, crossed with an old Q. or a Marquis of Hertford. That he should have dreamed of marrying the feather-brained feu-follet is just as unlikely as that she should have settled down into the douce housewife of the manse. If we are provoked to a laugh in "The Little Minister," we are more inclined to laugh at the author than with him. Yet Mr. Barrie could not be himself were there not another side to the story. Few of his scenes are more impressive, or more true to the life, than that which depicts old Nanny's horror of the poor-house, when the gypsy comes to the rescue like a genius of the "Arabian Nights." Not a few of the brief stories in the book Mr. Crockett published under the title of "The Stickit Minister" might have been written by Mr. Barrie, as they were undoubtedly inspired by him. "The Stickit Minister" is an exquisitely touching tale of heroic and unceasing self-sacrifice. He is not the victim of an unkindly fate. He has shown no shortcoming in godly gifts: he does not break down in his examinations; he does not prove a dumb dog, or speak, like the prophet, with a stammering tongue, for he never gets as far as the pulpit. He sacrifices his cherished spiritual ambitions for the sake of an ungrateful brother, and he is mercifully removed from the scenes of his earthly troubles by a galloping consumption before the waters of adversity have gone over his head. The noble nature which makes generous allowance is happily revealed in a single sentence, spoken to a friendly confidant. "He" (the brother) "was aye different to me, ye ken, Saunders, and he canna be judged by the same standard as you and me." "I ken," said Saunders M'Quhin, a spark of light lying in the quiet of his eyes. And Saunders knows his friend too well to say another word. Nearly as pathetically tragic is "The Heather Lintie," in which an ungainly and essentially prosaic moorland maiden, who has nursed the conviction that she is a poetic genius, is sadly disabused of the delusion as she lies on her deathbed. A coarse and venomous critique comes too late to kill, and it has but a short hour or two to torture. We recognize Mr. Barrie again in the close creed of the Marrow Kirk, which, as appears in a subsequent novel, when it met in solemn General Assembly, was represented by a couple of ministers, who constituted the whole of the clerical body, and by as many sanctimonious office-bearers who bore rule in a metropolitan congregation of some halfdozen. There is pleasant mockery in the ridicule of the proceedings, in which the members might have been legislating for a National Kirk. When they agree to differ or to "twine" there are two more Scottish sects, each embodied in a single infallible representative. In "Cleg Kelly," again, we have the clever conception which pleased the creator so much that it was afterwards elaborated, to his misfortune, into a lengthy volume. But, fortunately, Mr. Crockett was not content to trifle with his powers in slight sketches and tantalizingly short stories. Like Mr. Barrie, he launched out in the sensational novel, with greater dramatic gifts and more favorable opportunities. Mr. Barrie was a townsman of weaving Thrums, somewhat remotely connected with the Highlands and their romance by the glens that lead upwards to the Lower Grampians. It was the good fortune of Mr. Crockett to have been born in Galloway, the very home of wild legend, of fierce warfare and daring adventure, and of the pious traditions kept sacred in many a memory. The Galwegians still made a stand against the legions when Agricola had carried the eagles into the far north. Galloway with its trackless morasses and its broken seaboard was a second fatherland to the roving Egyptians and the favorite resort of the smugglers from France and Holland, who ran their cargoes in the moonlight in its creeks and bays. But, above all, Galloway was a sanctuary for the persecuted West-country Whigs; the wanderers held their conventicles in the solitudes of the moorlands, where the moan of the lapwing and the scream of the curlew chimed in with the bursts of prayer and praise; and in its caves the apostles of the Covenant found safe retreat when Clavers and Lagg were beating the hills for them. More The sufferings and escapes of God's persecuted folk must have appealed most strongly to Mr. Crockett's Cameronian sympathies. Yet we place "The Raiders" as by far the first of his works. There is no approach to rhapsody, cant, or rant in it, though we only use those strong expressions as indicating the snares which more or less beset any Presbyterian writer on the times of the Trouble. over, construction is not Mr. Crockett's forte, and in "The Raiders" he is kept straight by stress of circumstances. The story follows the fortunes of two lives that are closely intertwined. It abounds in exciting episodes which arise naturally out of the situations; it is compact and logically sensational, for the setting is so picturesque that thrilling incidents evolve themselves spontaneously. The people in the fertile Gallwegian lowlands are literally living between the devil and the deep sea. On the one hand they are subjected to the descents of the black or the white smugglers—that is, of men who shoot and slash only in self-defence, or of ruffians who, having forfeited their lives, are ready for any atrocity. These descents of the contrabandists are spasmodic or casual; besides most of the white smugglers are kenned folk who have kin all over the country. Even austere Cameronians look leniently on breaches of the excise laws, and if they find an anker of brandy at the back of a dyke, they thank the Almighty for his mercies, and convey it into a sure place of hiding. But, on the other hand, and in the hills, are the gypsy outlaws who neither fear God nor regard men, and have their fastnesses whither the sheriff dare not follow them. They are the Raiders who drive their creaghs like barbarous Highland caterans, who levy blackmail on all and sundry, and when the laird is at feud with them, or the tenant refuses their "cess," set the red cock crowing of a night in the stackyard and peaceful homestead. A lad of spirit, left to his own guardianship and devices, could hardly help being drawn into these broils, and Patrick Heron commits himself doubly by falling in love with the daughter of a fighting family to whom gypsies and black smugglers bear a deadly enmity. So the story, as we said, travels forward of itself. Like the amphibious hero of the siege of Acre, Mr. Crockett displays his warlike versatility Alike to him the sea, the shore, We have a succession of highly illustrative pictures. There are surprises of slumbering farmers, and attacks in force on half-fortified feudal mansions. There are brawls and fierce single combats with rough and ready weapons; there are games of hide and seek in the moors where the penalty of discovery is death; and horrors come to a climax in the robbers' den above "the murder hole" in the dark loch, where the reluctant guest shudders at bed-clothes clotted with gore, and finds a corpse in the oaken chest which is the sole furniture of the chamber. It is superfluous to add that the hero's lady-love is ravished from him, and that, following her to what was literally the back of his world, he saves her by heroic audacity and superhuman endurance. But the most impressive of these brilliantly effective scenes is the raiding and driving of a great herd of Lowland cattle when the country has been roused and the passes occupied. The subject has been often treated by Scottish painters, but never, perhaps, with so much spirit. We see the cattle stampeded in the night, with the wild horsemen and footmen goading them forward. We see the overdriven beasts falling out before "the hurrying pikeman's goad," as the weaker become footsore, hungry and athirst. Finally, there is the demoniacal scene when the raiders with their droves are repeatedly repulsed from the narrow bridgeway that has been secured by their pursuers. The cries of jubilation are raised prematurely, for the Egyptians have an infernal device in reserve. The bellowing herd is besprinkled with tar, then matches are set to their shaggy hides; they are bestridden by the baffled demons who are herding them, and the defenders are swept away in the headlong rush. The catastrophe which metes out the long-deferred vengeance, now that the cup of iniquity has been filled to overflowing, is wrought out in the memorable storm of the fifteen days which buried these uplands in impenetrable snowdrift. And the elect are saved, as in the ill days of the Trouble, by sheltering in a commodious cave only known to the mysterious "Silver Sand." Nor is Mr. Crockett anyways inferior to Mr. Barrie in dry and subtle humor. We take at random a remark of the hero's father, when giving his Silver Sand is ingeniously intro- of Auchindrane," he may change the duced. We had read a full half of the secular for the religious garb, and asvolume before recollecting that we similate his ministers and lay saints had heard nothing of John Faa, al- to the tone of the Puritanism of the though it professes to relate certain times. There is the outspoken Scotch passages in his life. Then of course lady of the olden school, who brings we caught the clue to the mystery blushes to the cheeks of maidens by which it would have been morally im- calling a spade a spade; there is the possible to maintain to the end. John narrow-minded minister with a fanatiFaa, a belted earl and hereditary cal misconception of his mission, but prince and seer of the Faa clan, had a very warm human heart; there is from circumstances, adequately ex- the youth drawn by circumstances plained, a foot in either camp. As and godly education to the side of perBaillie Jarvie's worthy father the dea- secuted religion, though the blood of con might have said, he had a con- warm summer is flowing hotly in his science of a sort and drew the line veins and the old Adam is roused on at cold-blooded murder. But blood slight provocation; there is the henbeing thicker than water, and as, pecked husband who is a man of acafter all, he was a monarch by divine tion nevertheless, and, above all, there right, he continued relations with his is the shrill-voiced motherly woman, kin and their more villainous allies, whose bark is far worse than her bite, whose misdeeds he condemned and and whose heart and home are ever solemnly cursed. open as the day to melting charity. Sundry Scotch romancers have painted Claverhouse. The Clavers of "Old Mortality," though censured by McCrie, was limned with the vigorous realism of a Raeburn and can never be surpassed. The Ettrick Shepherd, from the point of view of the Cameronian hill-shepherd, gave a ludicrously burlesqued caricature in "The Brownie of Bodbeck." But it seems to us that Mr. Crockett, between Presbyterian sympathies and romantic admiration of chivalrous courage, has hit off a singularly happy mean and sketched a very probable personality. His Claverhouse is a gentleman, fanatical in his loyalty, as his victims were in their religious faith, but a soldier with a heart as hard as the temper of his sword, and with a constitutional indifference to suffering, fostered by an exaggerated sense of duty. If the genial Scott could speak lightly in the beginning of this century of "the beastly Covenanters," who were only superior to the brutes inasmuch as they walked on two legs, we can, perhaps, appreciate the feelings with which Graham regarded the Calvinists son the mature fruit of his wisdom: Mind ye, Patrick (he used to say), that the Good Book says, "a soft answer turneth away wrath." Now keep your temper, laddie. Never quarrel wi' an angry person, specially a woman. Mind ye, a soft answer's aye best. It's commanded, and forbye, it makes them far madder than anything else ye could say. We should be sorry to aver that Mr. Crockett is a man of one book, or of two, and moreover, it would be unjust. But, comparing him with himself, the "Stickit Minister," and the "Raiders," in their respective manners, stand far above his other productions. Scott's critics were in the habit of objecting that a Meg Merrilees was always cropping up in his novels. With more reason we may say that in Mr. Crockett's mossland romances we are forever renewing acquaintance with almost identical types, although in "The Men of the Moss Hags" and "The Grey Men |