The thunder shook them as they sat in the darkened house. Pale as one from the grave, and bleeding thick and fast, Philip Ernly entered and stood before them. He raised high his horror-clenched hands :— "If either of you has been in this business "-He could say no more, but fell down at their feet, as one dead.

Young Ernly recovered from his wounds once more— for he had been deeply hit by a ball as he swam. Adding the ambition of being a marked leader in a struggling cause to his indignant sense of persecution, he now joined the Covenanters, and led a strong band from hill to hill, attacking the forces of the enemy, and protecting, with defensive stations, the congregations of the outcast worshippers, wherever they were gathered on any great solemn occasion.

One day the Covenanting Sacrament was dispensed on this Mount of Communion, where these stone seats, with this central Table of stone, had been raised for the purpose of the commemorative rite. On this rude Table were placed the holy symbols of Christ's broken body and shed blood. The communicants sat around. Mary Hume's venerable father was the dispensing pastor. At the foot of the hill, with a small select troop, stood Philip Ernly, to guard that hallowed fellowship above from the hovering enemy. The enemy came. They fought. Amidst the clash and shouts of battle that awful communion went on undisturbed: No man turned aside his head for a moment. The foe was routed, but the chosen warrior of the Faithful was smitten down. He was carried up to the Mount of Communion in his blood, and received the Sacrament from the hands of his wife's father-ere he died. They wrapped his body in the sacred cloth which had covered that Table of Ordinance, and bore him homeward to Ernly Tower.

The Dame of Ernly was going in her carriage to Ralph Boyd's wedding, when a party carrying something in a white sheet met her. Some of them laid hold of the horses, and stopped the carriage. Others opened the door of it, and held up the dead body of her son before her face, and asked her, "Where shall we lay him?

"Let him lie with those he died for! Drive on!" was the Dame's stern answer. And the coachman whipping the horses, they galloped on.

"Amen, then!” said one of the hoary bearers of the dead. And they took Philip Ernly's body and buried it below that central Table on their Mount of Communion.

The Lady of Ernly maintained a steady face throughout that gay nuptial evening. But ghastly visions and woeful words seemed ever about to shape and syllable themselves to her from the far dances of that festive hall. Her heart was waiting for something drear, she knew not what. With all her haughty firmness, she was ill at ease.

Ralph Boyd was now master of Ernly, and being of a cold nature, he had no compunction in taking possession. The childless Widow of Ernly had to leave her halls. To aggravate her state, she learned from the remorseful dying confession of the Captain who had executed Mary Hume, that Ralph Boyd was at the bottom of that bloody busiAnd she now saw his motive.

ness.

The Mount of Communion became a ghost-haunted place to the terrified country folks all around. The form of a woman was seen there at midnight: So they said. Haunted, indeed, the Mount was: It was mother-haunted. One Sabbath morning the widow of Ernly was found kneeling on the top of it, her hands clasped together, and her face laid upon that central Table of stone, above her son's dust. She was dead. She had died in the act of prayer.

"You can guess now, O Sister Shade," added the Appearance of Burns, "that the ghosts we saw here, as they parted, were Philip Ernly and his mother, and Mary Hume and her father. But ha! I smell the breath of morning. Away! away! We shall meet here again."

The two Martyrs, with their Sister Spirit, linked hand. in hand, glided away noiselessly toward Irongray churchyard. The Ghost of the Bard sprung aloft in another direction; wings of majesty flew out from his shoulders as he went onward; his form waxed gradually clearer and brighter, till at last he became red as the meteor that ploughs the dark ether of the autumnal night. He closed his wings and descended upon Dumfries.

I felt my eyes dazzled and aching from gazing after the Poet's burning flight; whereupon I awoke, and found I had fallen asleep by the evening fire in my snug little Library. I had turned my face to my lamp; and it was this, and not the fiery flight of the Bard, that had awaked me. The peculiar style of my dream may have been prompted by certain old traditionary things I had seen and heard in Galloway, where I had lately been on a visit. But I could not help smiling at the incongruities of my visionary interlocutors.

CHAPTER XI.

SUMMER SAUNTERINGS.

IN these late years we certainly have not had the right proportion of those soft-dropping days which marked the Mays of my boyhood-so green, so balmy fresh. The

May of this year has been as dry and dusty as an antiquary; the crimped and downy leaf of the budding beech scarcely ventured from its brown scaly shell; while the ash, always a slow but manly fellow-most gracefully beautiful, however, in his season-stood as grey and sullen as a six weeks' frost. June is now the May of our year; or rather she is

"April and May and June commingled into one:

so young is she, so tender; and yet so lush and leafy. A few days ago the Sun drove back the frosty clouds,

"And turned his face to the dew-dropping south."

All at once the pith of the year burst out; pleasant to the eye swayed the long heavy saplings; the cows, with their silky spotted sides as sleek as butter, waded ankle-deep in the flowery grass; frogs jumped about; and black snails had their evening walks.

Who does not remember the caustic denouncement by Sterne of the cant of criticism? Were it merely as a symptom of affectation in the individual who uses it, most richly would it still deserve the scorn of Shandy; but when we see it blighting and blasting Literature and the Fine Arts, as it has so often done, it deserves still less to be spared. The cant of criticism has been especially pernicious in the fine department of painting. Nothing but the "Old Masters will go down with a certain set of monomaniacs, who would give any sum for a piece of spurious canvass, palmed off upon their ignorance on the banks of the Tiber or the Arno, while they would turn up their noses at a piece of genuine inspiration on the banks of the Thames or the Tweed. This mania, then, has fulfilled the double office of evil, by leading to the admiration of much trash, merely because it was foreign and passed for old, and by leading to an equal undervaluing of what was good, merely because it was new and of home

Two or

production-thereby leading to a great discouragement of our native painters. From this cause, and from other circumstances," the serene and silent Art" has of late been too much neglected in this country; and though Wilkie, and Allan, and Thomson, and others, have produced things that will live for ever in their immortal beauty, they have hardly yet convinced the country of the possibility and the policy of reviving the genius of the "Old Masters" in her own gifted sons, simply by yielding them a due share of her praise and her patronage. three years ago, this beautiful Art in Scotland seemed near its extinction. Not that we had not a few worthies whose fame was imperishable, and a few devoted young men whom no neglect could keep down; but, upon the whole, so cold was the cloud of neglect under which the Art was kept, that gradually every star of enthusiasm must have gone out alone, without lending from its golden urn new light to new luminaries. It was pitiful to see so many fine ardent young men haunting all the summer the regions of Beauty, by hill, and sliding stream, and ancient wood, and "chasms and watery depths," and grey eldritch ruins nodding to the moon; and presenting next spring on the walls of the Scottish Academy their composite dreams of loveliness to a country which carelessly admired, and bought nothing at all. Now, however, our Associations for the Encouragement of Painting are changing the state of matters altogether. Our young artists are stimulated to unusual exertions by the proud consciousness that their meritorious labours can no longer be overlooked or unrewarded; while the circumstance, that many pictures are yearly finding their way into every province of the country, is tending still more widely to diffuse a love of this divine Art, and is thus more than renewing the patronage by which our own native Muse of Painting