made, stout lad; and though the most marked indications of silliness were, from his very childhood, visible in his face and actions and gait; since the Laird St. Clyde's murder, as we have observed, he became undaunted and resolute, talked little, and

"To sit on rocks, to muse o'er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest's shady scene,

Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne'er or rarely been ;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
Alone o'er steeps and foaming falls to lean!"-

this was Glass's work; lone, pensive, strangely altered in his outward mien, from all attention Sandy stood not. quite exempt; and when

"He shunned nor sought, but coldly passed them by,' people attributed his look of grief, and want of gesture wild, to the death of his good friend the Laird St. Clyde.

The pedler was often met by Glass, and showed strange looks that "daft Sandy" should always be in those bye

roads he took, in crossing muirs and morasses, the woods and glens, which in the way of his trade he had for five years travelled.

The close of the former year, and the beginning of the one at which our history is now arrived, were very sorrowful to the people of that part of the island where these scenes are laid; even their new cloaths had not been made for the new year, when the tailors, all around the country, were summoned to many of the wealthy houses to make mournings and blacks,

The good minister himself came to perceive that Sandy might yet become useful to some of the farmers, since he showed a willingness to do odd jobs, to which, formerly, he could not be induced to put his hand, for love nor reward. But it was only to the minister, and Ellen St. Clyde, that Glass gave indications of usefulness to society.

But the sand glass was missed from the parish school-house, and nobody could tell where it had been carried to; every boy denied all knowledge of the theft, and the dominie could charge none of them with any thing of this nature before; but it was recollected by one of the boys, that the back windows of the school-house were not fastened on the inside, and on examining the snow in the kail-yard, the prints of a man's feet were very distinctly seen, and traced to the window opposite to the dominie's own desk; and on a more minute investigation, the rough cast on the outer wall was perceived to have been scratched and rubbed off, as if by the toes of a man's shoes, or some stick with which he got up to the window: it being at least four feet from the ground without.

The laird killed! the school robbed! and neither murderer nor robber found

out! these were the universal topics of conversation every long winter's night, at every ingle in the isle. But there was no clue to lead to the discovery of either the one or the other. The parents of the boys at school were as much interested in searching for the thief of the hour-glass, as was the schoolmaster, Mr. Maclean; and they were prompted to this by the hope that their children being found guiltless, there might be some other measures taken to discover the thief, who every one fancied was also the murderer.

But there were no strangers on the isle, at least none in that quarter; and the beggars were all too well known for tried probity to be suspected. In fact, the beggars on this isle in the ocean were her own offspring, now grown old and infirm, or those who, when in the meridian of their wealth, never knew what it was to live above

the condition of a cotter or farmer's servant; and the poor old maimed soldier was a kind of honorary beggar in Rothsay; from which, for a month before and after new-years' day, he never departed, since the town's folks in their usual mirth and glee gave the disabled Archy Rankin plenty of food, some old cloths, and on hogmanay he generally gathered from thirty to forty shillings, to buy snuff and tobacco for the rest of the year.

His tailor never sent in his bill, from one year to another; his shoemaker expected to be discharged his bill when the "Sermon on the mount" received its application; and those who fed and lodged Archy Rankin in the spring and the summer, in the autumn and the winter, thought it was very hard, if the eagle of the rock was sheltered from the weather, and lived on their lambs, a poor auld soger should lie in