OLD SIR DOUGLAS. CHAPTER I. HOME, SWEET HOME. THERE is no example of human beauty more perfectly picturesque than a very handsome man of middle age. No, smiling reader, not even a very handsome young man not even that same man in his youth. The gain is in expression, of which every age has its own; and perhaps there is more change in that than in the features, under the working hand of Time. When luckless Dr. Donne wrote to the proud mother of the famous George Herbert of Bemerton and Lord Herbert of Cherbury— 'Nor spring nor summer beauty hath the grace it is to be feared he was more complimentary than veracious; for bloom is an integral part of woman's loveliness, and every day that brings her nearer to its withering takes away something of her charm. But with the other sex it is different. The youth who is noble-looking, glad, eager, gallant and gay as the young Lochinvar, will yet be handsomer when time shall have given him that air of customary command, of mingled majesty, wisdom, and cordial benevolence, which belongs to a later date; and which, in fine natures, results from much mingling with the joys, sorrows, and destinies of other men, with an increased instead of a diminished sympathy in all that concerns them. Often, too, this is accompanied by a genial cheerfulness of manner, springing from the same source. At the age of which I am speaking, small annoyances have ceased to afflict: great hopes and fears are subject to a more noble reserve: the passionate selfishness of inexperience has vanished: the restlessness of learning how much or how little life can achieve is calmed down. The smile of welcome in such a man's countenance is worth all the beauty of his adolescent years. B And if there should be any of my readers who, in spite of this argument, refuse to become converts to such unusual doctrine, and obstinately adhere to a contrary opinion, that is because they never Saw SIR DOUGLAS ROSS OF GLENROSSIE, familiarly called by his tenantry and his few remaining family ties, Old Sir Douglas.' He had indeed been called by that name before he could reasonably be said to have earned it before his dark and thickly-curled hair had shown any of those rare silver threads which the American poet, Longfellow, beautifully imagines as the Dawn of another life-that breaks o'er the earthly horizon, He was called Old Sir Douglas, chiefly, as it seemed, because everybody else was 30 young. His father had run away with a beautiful and penniless Miss Macrae, when he was scarcely twenty. At five-and-twenty he was a widower with two infant sons; and by way of at once satisfying his family, redeeming the past, and giving a second mother to those young children, he wedded with the heiress of Toulmains; a very stiff and starched successor to the blooming and passionate girl whom he had laid in her grave so early that his union with her grew to be a vague dream rather than a distinct memory. But the sunshine was off the path of his life for ever: and perhaps that instinet of insufficiency to another's happiness, which haunts the hearts of those who live in intimacy together, even when those hearts are not very tender, crept into the hard shell where beat a sort of cold fish-life, in the bosom of the second Lady Ross, and soured still further a nature never genial. Hateful to her was the memory of that first wife; displeasing to the last degree the sight of her orphan children and the sound of their prattle. She spent her time in steady efforts at repression, and in a series of inventive punishments, principally directed against the sin of liveliness. She did not relax in her system even after she herself became a mother; and the little pale shrewd sharp-browed half-sister she gave the boys, seemed indeed to have been modelled on her own pattern. Still, resolute, and reserved; that tiny girl foreshadowed the woman to be, and faithfully transmitted the soul and spirit of her progenitrix. Young as the first brood were when they lost their loving mother, they felt the change. Home was home still, but it was home frappé à la glace; and the efforts of Lady Ross to train and nail them as snow-berries not only failed, but produced, as years went on, a sort of chronic state of rebellion; insomuch that, even had her wishes been reasonable and gently expressed (two conditions that never existed), I fear she would have found the two boys, Douglas and Kenneth, wilfully provided with a stock of ready-made opposition. In a household where the sole break in the monotony of discontent was a change from storms to sullenness on the part of the governing authority, and a corresponding change from passion to dejection in the young things that were to be governed, it was not to be expected that nature should be properly disciplined, or minds effectually taught. The boys learned as little as they could, and resisted as much as they dared. Their affection for each other was proportionate to their isolation at home, and before they were severally nine and ten years old, their chief pleasure was to roam over the hills behind the castle, their arms twined round each other's necks, talking of the insupportable tyranny of stepmothers, as set forth in all the stories they had ever read, and planning wild and boyish attempts at escapes from such thraldom. From their father they received neither instruction nor guidance. Tormented and disappointed himself, his weak and impulsive nature took that turn to evil from which perhaps a pious, cheerful, loving helpmate might have saved him. Captious in his temper, drunken in his habits, given greatly to those open grievous twits and taunts in the wars of home, which seem to lookers-on so indecent and embarrassing and which a man should be taught to govern and conceal in his soul, as he is told to clothe the nakedness of his body, -his children combined an utter absence of respect for him, with a certain degree of prejudiced pity. If they did not think him always in the right in the family quarrels they witnessed, at least they always thought their stepmother in the wrong. 'Poor papa' was their kindliest mention of him; and 'papa's too lazy to care' the common salve to their conscience when doing something that had been absolutely forbidden. At length came that crisis in their child-life which might be expected. Among the smaller obstinacies about which papa was too lazy to care,' and which was the subject of fierce reprobation with their stepmother, was the constant presence of two rough terriers, which had been given to the two boys, in the earliest stage of their mutual puppyhood, by the old keeper. Jock and Beardie were installed as idols in their young masters' hearts. Rustling through the brushwood, leaping over the purple heather, panting through the brawling burns, covered with dust or drenched with rain, as the |