The first of these routes is of course the longest, both in time and distance. It takes the merchandise by an extensive détour, which, from the mouth of the Ohio River, viâ the Gulf, to New York, exceeds three thousand miles. Although lying in the powerful current of the Gulf Stream, which is a propelling force speeding forward the vessel that trusts its warm, blue waters, this route is exposed to the most violent cyclonic storms, and navigators shun and evade it during the equinoctial or hurricane season. But, barring danger and distance, no country with such an outlet to the sea as the Mississippi River affords can be considered dependent upon any artificial communication. Notwithstanding the objections which exist to this long route (which is both expensive and long), its trade is rapidly increasing from the very exigencies of the case. The introduction of the barge-system on the great Western rivers has greatly facilitated and cheapened transportation. Steam-tugs, carrying neither passengers nor freight, are substituted for the steamboat. These tugs never stop except to coal and attach the barges, already loaded before their arrival at a city, and proceed with great despatch. Steaming steadily on, night and day, they make the trip from St. Louis to New Orleans almost as quickly as the oft-detained steamboat. The distance has been made between these cities by a tug, with ten heavily-freighted barges, in six days. The tugs plying on the Minnesota River carry with good speed barges containing thirty thousand bushels of wheat, and the freight of a single trip would fill more than eighty railroad-cars. This transportation is cheap, because the tugs require less than one-fourth the expense for running and management required by the steamboats. The carriage of grain from Minnesota to New Orleans by this method costs no more than the freightage from the same point to Chicago by rail. A boatload of wheat from St. Paul, taking the river route, is not once handled until it is put aboard ship at the Crescent City. The mighty energy of the North-west—"the Germany of America," as it has been well called by Dr. Draper—has long since discovered that the Mississippi is the best existing route to European markets. Grain can be shipped by way of St. Louis and New Orleans to New York and Europe twenty cents a bushel cheaper than it can be carried by the other existing routes. As long ago as 1868 the Illinois Central Railroad took hold of the West India and Southern trade through the river route, and offered such commercial inducements to Western importers that "Havana sends her products by this route to the North-west, instead of by New York."[A] As the North-west expands and multiplies in resources and population, it will be compelled to transact its foreign and seaboard commerce through the noble navigable waters of the Mississippi, unless it can obtain a short and cheap transportation to New York by some trans-Alleghany water-line. In the event of the North-western trade being diverted southward along the great natural artery of the continent, where no tolls, no tariffs and no transhipments are required, the loss will fall most heavily upon New York and the seaboard marts. The increasing stream of South American commerce, in the same event, must inevitably take the short, speedy and entirely inexpensive route to the North-west (through the broad and free highway of the "Father of Waters"), rather than encounter the delay, danger and expense of the Gulf-Stream route to New York, and thence by rail or the Lakes to its destination. The longer the present trade-status continues, and the mammoth corporations of the railroads force the transportation of the North-west, the West and the Mississippi Valley to take the river and Gulf route to the sea, the greater and more fixed becomes the diversion of this incalculable commerce from the great markets of the Middle and Eastern States. So far, therefore, from the far West being at the mercy of the East in this matter, the former has the advantage. The East, rather than allow the present tendency of the commercial current to set well in toward the Gulf, and wear a channel for itself, should strain every nerve to keep it steadily moving toward its own maritime cities. The great cities of the Atlantic seaboard can better afford to construct a water-line over the mountains at their own cost than to run the risk of the Mississippi River becoming the commercial avenue for its vast valley and drainage, and thus bearing the golden stream away from their harbors and streets.

The Utopian idea that Norfolk may become the rival of the great seaports and centres of capital, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, is without the field of discussion. It is not more possible than that a magnetized knife-blade should exert a more powerful attraction than the largest lodestone or the mightiest electro-magnet.

The Lake route from the Mississippi Valley to the East was made continuous and complete by the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. The day of the old flat-boats had not then closed, and the application of steam to river navigation was still in its infancy. The growth of the West—which has always outstripped its internal improvements—like an immense river long dammed up, bursting the barriers that confined it, forced its way toward the sea. Although it was said at first that the canal would never pay, "the opening of this work," as the Superintendent of the Census says, "was an announcement of a new era in the internal grain-trade of the United States. To the pioneer, the agriculturist and the merchant the grand avenue developed a new world. From that period do we date the rise and progress of the North-west." This splendid structure is to-day the great artery of Eastern wealth; and but for the fact that for six months in the year, when the vast sea of Western commerce would seek an outlet through its banks to the East, it is locked by ice, it would be widened into a ship-canal. It lies in the very track of the great north-westerly winds, which descend with torrential rush and polar cold over the Lakes, and thence through Northern New York. Last year, as late as the third of March, when the vegetation of the Middle States was beginning to spring forth in vernal beauty, the whole of the lower Lake region and Western and Northern New York were swept by these Arctic tempests; and this is the climatic rule rather than an exceptional case. Even in the season of open water the Lakes are exposed to the most violent storms, and within their narrow shores hundreds of vessels are annually lost. The mariner overtaken by what would be a moderate gale in a broad sea is in imminent peril for want of sea-room; and in a snow-storm, however light—whose winds elsewhere he would court to fill his sails and propel his craft—his course is beset with danger and difficulty. For more than half the year navigation is suspended by the thickening terrors of the tempest and the accumulated obstacles of ice.[B] And yet, with all the obstacles which impair the utility of the Lake route while it is in operation, the volume of Western produce prefers it, or rather is forced by the necessities of the case to employ it. And these necessities will continue to increase. With the aid of all the railroads now or to be constructed, the rapid expansion of Western commerce has distanced the facilities of transport. The iron horse, as has been well said, has always stimulated industry and production beyond his power to carry it. It was the forcible remark of the English traveler Sir Morton Peto that the American railroads from West to East were "choked with traffic." So great is the inadequacy of all existing outlets for conveying the more than Amazonian streams of trans-Alleghany merchandise that it has long since become the interest of every great corporation, as well as of every citizen of the country, to open for them new and national highways.

From this digression, embracing facts and views which seemed essential to an intelligent discussion of the main subject, we pass on to examine the Appalachian outlet by which the great Western empire of America may find its way to the sea. The bird's-eye view here presented will show the Appalachian mountain-chain, and the waters which thread their way along its gentle slopes eastward to the Atlantic basin and westward to the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys. The Alleghanies bear a striking geographic resemblance to the Highlands of Scotland, so famed in song and story. Like the central Grampian Hills—those majestic buttresses in whose recesses the old Caledonians found secure and impregnable asylums from the Roman legions—except that they are richer in verdure and less lofty, they form the grand natural rampart of the American Union. To use the words of Lavallée, the French military historian and statistician, "Mountains play the principal part in military operations: true ramparts of states, they interrupt the development of strategic movements, and render the greatest efforts necessary for their passage and possession. They are the poetical part of the theatre of the art of war." If the day ever comes, as come it may, when the kingly powers of the world combine to crush the republican institutions of the United States, and swarm the harbors and bays of our Atlantic seaboard with their allied navies, the defiles of the Alleghanies will prove the Thermopylæs of the Union; and against their eastern base the surging wave of invasion must be stayed, if stayed at all. Like the Scottish peaks,

or the Spanish wall of the Pyrenean chain, on whose Sierras, in 1808, Wellington's blazing lines of Torres Vedras arrested Massena's march, the mountains that look out on our Atlantic sea-front must ever be of the highest military importance.

To throw across their central ridges a great aqueduct is no mean undertaking of merely local significance, but may take rank with the old Roman aqueducts, with the magnificent roads constructed by Napoleon over the Alps, and with the more modern and now triumphant tunnels through Mont Cenis and the Hoosac Mountains, and the rapidly-progressing railway over the Andes from Callao to the Amazon Valley.

The broad and national features of the proposed trans-Alleghany water-way have so strongly commended themselves to President Grant that in his last message he recommends preliminary Congressional action, and in a more recent address to a number of distinguished visitors at the Executive Mansion he used much stronger and bolder language in assuring them that "he hoped Congress would give such encouragement to the measure as to secure the completion of the canal." He has in these words only repeated the sentiments of his illustrious predecessors, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, in behalf of the value of the work. We have already alluded to Mr. Jefferson's early advocacy of a water-line by the James and Kanawha Rivers. The first idea of this enterprise seems to have been suggested to Washington as early as the year 1753, after his celebrated trip from Jamestown to Fort Duquesne as an envoy of Governor Dinwiddie. At the close of the Revolutionary war he made an arduous and personal exploration of the country for many hundred miles. He kept a journal in which were minutely recorded his conversations with all intelligent persons he met respecting the facilities for internal navigation afforded by the rivers rising in the Alleghany Mountains and flowing either east or west. Returning to Mount Vernon October 4, 1784, he wrote, as the result of his observations, to the then governor of Virginia, the father of William Henry Harrison: "I shall take the liberty now, my dear sir, to suggest a matter which would (if I am not too short-sighted a politician) mark your administration as an important era in the annals of this country. It has been my decided opinion that the shortest, easiest and least expensive communication with the invaluable and extensive country back of us would be by one or both of the rivers of this State which have their sources in the Appalachian Mountains." General Washington, on the 26th of August, 1785, became the first president of the company authorized by the legislation which he had suggested previously to Governor Harrison. It is well known that the same views entertained by Washington and Jefferson were held and advocated by Mr. Madison, long before the most prescient statesman could descry the faintest image of that colossal empire of population, wealth and rapid development now lying west of the Alleghanies.

For the great future water-ways which are needed for the Western, the North-western and the Mississippi Valley trade there are several routes that have been demonstrated to be practicable. One of these is by a projected canal to connect the Coosa River with the Alabama River, and thence following that stream to the Gulf of Mexico. This, if ever carried out, as eventually it is probable will be the case, would avoid the bars and dangers of the navigation of the lower Mississippi, and in a measure obviate the necessity of the proposed sub-canals in Louisiana and other engineering expedients to remove or turn the very serious river-obstacles to an outlet south of New Orleans. Another proposal is to connect the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers, and to run a canal from the latter to the Ocmulgee or Savannah River, and thence by the use of slack water to reach the harbors of Savannah and Charleston. This scheme has been clearly proved to be feasible, although the distance seems objectionable. The third (or central) water-line proposed is that so long agitated since the beginning of the present century, so often surveyed and re-surveyed by the most eminent engineers, and not long since by the United States Engineer Corps under the direction of General A. A. Humphreys, the chief engineer of the United States army. It is the shortest and most direct line, and has the advantage that it is, as we have seen, already nearly half completed, from the head of tide-water on the James River, above Lexington, to Buchanan, near the summit-level of the mountains. The engineers who have reported upon it—among whom are the late Colonel E. Lorraine, Benjamin H. Latrobe, Esq., and other eminent engineers—estimate that the largest sum required for its completion to the Kanawha River is $37,364,000, and the length of time required four years. "Of this large sum, however," they say, "it can be clearly shown that there will be no need of any other advance by government than the interest which will accumulate while the work is in progress, which, by issuing the bonds every six months, as required, will not reach the sum of six million dollars. And this is every cent that will ever be required to be advanced. Should the government undertake to make the work a fine one, it will of course cost the whole amount estimated, but this would be more than made up by its increased benefits to the whole country.

"The work when completed, even at a low rate of tolls—not over about half the rate charged on the Erie Canal—will return the advance, pay the interest and redeem the principal in less than twenty years.

"In considering this question we are not left to mere conjecture. The wonderful history of the Erie Canal, and a comparison of the circumstances connected with the operations of that great work with those under which this enterprise will be inaugurated and accompanied, furnish sufficient data for reliable conclusions."

When we consider that the Erie Canal, though frozen up and useless for half the year, has not only long since paid for its construction out of its tolls, but makes a present of itself to the State, with about thirty millions of dollars of net profit, and that it does more than five times the business of the great New York Central Railroad, transporting annually over five million tons of cargo (which exceeds the total foreign commerce of New York City), and yet is "choked" and gorged with freight, the close figuring of the engineers does not appear to be questionable.

The immense saving in the cost of water-carriage as compared with that of railway-transportation is hardly conceived by the public mind. Many of the railroads carry produce at very low and reasonable rates, but they cannot afford to take it at much if any less than three times the amount charged by the canals. It appears from the report of the New York State Engineer for 1868 that the average receipts per ton per mile on the New York Central Railroad and the Erie Railway was 2.92 cents and 2.42 cents respectively; while on the New York State canals it was 1 cent only, tolls included. But a trans-Alleghany canal would, after getting fully into operation, be able to transport produce more cheaply than the New York canals, which are frozen over about five months of the year, and during the very period when the great tide of Western freightage and the ingathered crops is pressing most heavily for an outlet to the East.[C] There are many products of the West and the Mississippi Valley that will not bear the cost of transportation to the Eastern cities, either by rail, Gulf or Lake route, because they would consume in transitu for freight between sixty and seventy per cent. of their market value in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore.

These views have been ably and earnestly pressed time and again upon Congress by Eastern and Western statesmen, merchants and citizens of all classes, by the press of all parties, and by the boards of trade and commercial conventions. The surveys cover every foot of the proposed James River Canal extension to the Ohio Valley, which, by general consent, seems to be regarded as the most eligible because it is the most direct central route, and because the State of Virginia has most munificently offered to remand the half-completed work to the general government on the sole condition of its nationalization.

If, as history has always testified, it be true that

it would be difficult, as it is unnecessary, even to attempt to form an adequate estimate of this great trans-Alleghany highway as a benign and powerful agent in the political reconstruction and moral unification of the American States.

After leaving Buchanan, the proposed route for the extension of the James River and Kanawha Canal runs westward to the mouth of Fork Run, a small mountain-river, and ascends that stream to the summit-level, seventeen hundred feet above tide-water. It then pierces the main range of the Alleghanies, passing under Tuckahoe and Katis Mountains by a tunnel nearly eight miles long, and emerges into the valley of the Greenbrier River on the western mountain-slope. Its water-line pursues its course by slack-water navigation down the Greenbrier to New River, and down New River to Lyken's Shoals on the Kanawha, eighty-five miles above its mouth. The last distance of eighty-five miles will be traversed by open navigation, as the Kanawha Valley permits it. Major W. B. Craighill of the Engineer Corps, in his able report to General A. A. Humphreys on this central water-line, says: "The recent completion of the Mont Cenis Tunnel in Europe, and the rapid progress made with the Hoosac Tunnel in this country, with the experience gained in these works, and the improved facilities daily coming into use for carrying on such operations, induce us to approach such an undertaking as the Lorraine tunnel not only without apprehension of failure, but with a feeling of assured certainty of success. It is no longer an extraordinary, but an ordinary, undertaking."

The practical capacity of the water-line when completed will be of almost unlimited extent, while the canal proper with its locks will have a capacity of from fifteen to twenty millions of tons annually. In the fall and early winter, after the harvests are over, and during the very season that the highway is most needed, and when the northern routes are blocked by ice, this trans-Alleghany water-way will be open.

The local trade in its path would alone justify its construction. It will penetrate the finest mineral lands of Virginia and West Virginia, which have been so long locked up from the world. The great Kanawha coal-fields and iron- and salt-mines are unsurpassed by any now known in any part of the globe. In the large demand from England and Europe for coal, which is finding expression in the large orders sent to Philadelphia and Baltimore for Pennsylvania and Maryland coal,[D] there is the best possible evidence that the local trade of the national canal would be enormous. So highly thought of is the Kanawha cannel coal that it is now shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans, and sent thence by sea to New York, where it brings per ton about three times the price of anthracite in that market. It is equal to the best English and Nova Scotia cannel, while the Kanawha bituminous and splint coals are unsurpassed by any others. The veins lie horizontally, and vary from three to fifteen feet in thickness, the aggregate thickness of the various strata amounting in some localities to forty or fifty feet of the solid carbon.

But, great as are the local interests and the trade of the water-line, they are entirely lost sight of in the national aspect of the question.

The population now demanding a direct and central highway for its great inland commerce, according to the best estimates (those of Poor), cannot fall short of fifteen millions, and most probably exceeds that number. It is now conclusively established that the centre of gravity of our national population has crossed the Appalachian chain. Professor Hilgard of the Coast Survey prepared a year ago, at the request of the Hon. J. A. Garfield of Ohio, a series of calculations to ascertain this centre of gravity by the four last censuses. Supposing a plane of the exact shape and size of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, loaded with the actual population, he determined the points on which it would balance. In the recently-published words[E] of Mr. Garfield we give the following results of Professor Hilgard's calculations: By this process he found that in 1840 the centre of gravity of the population was at a point in Virginia near the eastern foot of the Appalachian chain, and near the parallel of 39° N. latitude. In 1850 this centre had moved westward fifty-seven miles across the mountains, to a point nearly south of Parkersburg, Virginia. In 1860 it had moved westward eighty-two miles, to a point nearly south of Chillicothe, Ohio. In 1870 it had reached a point near Wilmington, Clinton county, Ohio, about forty-five miles north-east of Cincinnati. In no case had it widely departed from the thirty-ninth parallel. If the same rate be maintained during the next three decades, which I doubt, it will fall in the neighborhood of Bloomington, Indiana, by 1900. Professor Hilgard also found that a line drawn from Lake Erie, at the north-eastern corner of Ohio, to Pensacola in Florida, would divide the population of the United States, as it stood in 1870, into two equal parts. This line is nearly parallel to the line of the Atlantic coast. From these calculations it will appear that both the "centre of gravity" and the line that divides the population in half are more than one hundred and fifty miles west of the Appalachian chain.

If these computations be correct, Poor's figures are too low by two or three millions at least. But, apart from the demand for an inter-continental canal by the population on the west of the Appalachian chain, the seaboard States and cities east of the Appalachians are, as we have already shown, as profoundly interested in such a national cheap thoroughfare as is the former section. Careful estimates have shown that the surplus produce[F] of the trans-Alleghany sections and the Mississippi Valley cannot be less than twenty-five million tons; and this would immediately seek an outlet through the Virginia water-line to the sea. The saving that would result to the West and to the whole country would be enormous; and at a very moderate calculation the amount would be an average of two dollars per ton on the river route, viâ New Orleans, and ten dollars per ton over the railroad routes. The completion of a comparatively short canal of eighty miles, to cover the gap from Buchanan to the upper Kanawha, would without the shadow of exaggeration save the West forty millions of dollars a year; and the central water-line would yield an interest of ten to fifteen per cent. on the capital invested, while opening a continuous water-road from Liverpool to Omaha, running nearly due west, fifty-nine hundred miles in length! By reducing the freights on the other present thoroughfares through the influence of wholesome competition, it would perhaps at once lessen the cost of inland transportation by nearly one hundred millions of dollars annually!

These considerations, and the added fact that for many years the chambers of commerce of the great Western cities, the many commercial conventions that have met, and the legislatures of the States bordering on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, have earnestly and unanimously memorialized Congress in behalf of the completion of this great inter-continental highway, fully establish the national character of the measure now pending in the national councils.

Thompson B. Maury.

A PRINCESS OF THULE.

As he drove through the town of Stornoway the children playing within the shelter of the cottage doors called to each other in a whisper, and said, "That is the King of Borva."

But the elderly people said to each other, with a shake of the head, "It iss a bad day, this day, for Mr. Mackenzie, that he will be going home to an empty house. And it will be a ferry bad thing for the poor folk of Borva, and they will know a great difference, now that Miss Sheila iss gone away, and there iss nobody—not anybody at all—left in the island to tek the side o' the poor folk."

He looked neither to the right nor to the left, though he was known to many of the people, as he drove away from the town into the heart of the lonely and desolate land. The wind had so far died down, and the rain had considerably lessened, but the gloom of the sky was deepened by the drawing on of the afternoon, and lay heavily over the deary wastes of moor and hill. What a wild and dismal country was this which lay before and all around him, now that the last traces of human occupation were passed! There was not a cottage, not a stone wall, not a fence, to break the monotony of the long undulations of moorland, which in the distance rose into a series of hills that were black under the darkened sky. Down from those mountains, ages ago, glaciers had slowly crept to eat out hollows in the plains below; and now in those hollows were lonely lakes, with not a tree to break the line of their melancholy shores. Everywhere around were the traces of the glacier-drift—great gray boulders of gneiss fixed fast into the black peat-moss or set amid the browns and greens of the heather. The only sound to be heard in this wilderness of rock and morass was the rushing of various streams, rain-swollen and turbid, that plunged down their narrow channels to the sea.

The rain now ceased altogether, but the mountains in the far south had grown still darker, and to the fisherman passing by the coast it must have seemed as though the black peaks were holding converse with the louring clouds, and that the silent moorland beneath was waiting for the first roll of the thunder. The man who was driving along this lonely route sometimes cast a glance down toward this threatening of a storm, but he paid little heed to it. The reins lay loose on the backs of the horses, and at their own pace they followed, hour after hour, the rising and falling road that led through the moorland and past the gloomy lakes. He may have recalled mechanically the names of those stretches of water—the Lake of the Sheiling, the Lake of the Oars, the Lake of the Fine Sand, and so forth—to measure the distance he had traversed; but he seemed to pay little attention to the objects around him, and it was with a glance of something like surprise that he suddenly found himself overlooking that great sea-loch on the western side of the island in which was his home.

He drove down the hill to the solitary little inn of Garra-na-hina. At the door, muffled up in a warm woolen plaid, stood a young girl, fair-haired, blue-eyed, and diffident in look.

"Mr. Mackenzie," she said, with that peculiar and pleasant intonation that marks the speech of the Hebridean who has been taught English in the schools, "it wass Miss Sheila wrote to me to Suainabost, and she said I might come down from Suainabost and see if I can be of any help to you in the house."

The girl was crying, although the blue eyes looked bravely through the tears as if to disprove the fact.

"Ay, my good lass," he said, putting his hand gently on her head, "and it wass Sheila wrote to you?"

"Yes, sir, and I hef come down from Suainabost."

"It is a lonely house you will be going to," he said absently.

"But Miss Sheila said I wass—I wass to—" But here the young girl failed in her effort to explain that Miss Sheila had asked her to go down to make the house less lonely. The elderly man in the wagonette seemed scarcely to notice that she was crying: he bade her come up beside him; and when he had got her into the wagonette he left some message with the innkeeper, who had come to the door, and drove off again.

They drove along the high land that overlooks a portion of Loch Roag, with its wonderful network of islands and straits, and then they stopped on the lofty plateau of Callernish, where there was a man waiting to take the wagonette and horses.

"And you would be seeing Miss Sheila away, sir?" said the man; "and it wass Duncan Macdonald will say that she will not come back no more to Borva."

The old man with the big gray beard only frowned and passed on. He and the girl made their way down the side of the rocky hill to the shore, and here there was an open boat awaiting them. When they approached, a man considerably over six feet in height, keen-faced, gray-eyed, straight-limbed and sinewy in frame, jumped into the big and rough boat and began to get ready for their departure. There was just enough wind to catch the brown mainsail, and the King of Borva took the tiller, his henchman sitting down by the mast. And no sooner had they left the shore and stood out toward one of the channels of this arm of the sea, than the tall, spare keeper began to talk of that which made his master's eye grow dark. "Ah, well," he said, in the plaintive drawling of his race, "and it iss an empty house you will be going to, Mr. Mackenzie; and it iss a bad thing for us all that Miss Sheila hass gone away; and it iss many's ta time she will hef been wis me in this very boat—"

"—— —— —— —— you, Duncan Macdonald!" cried Mackenzie, in an access of fury, "what will you talk of like that? It iss every man, woman and child on the island will talk of nothing but Sheila! I will drive my foot through the bottom of the boat if you do not hold your peace!"

The tall gillie patiently waited until his master had exhausted his passion, and then he said, as if nothing had occurred, "And it will not do much good, Mr. Mackenzie, to tek ta name o' God in vain; and there will be ferry much more of that now since Miss Sheila iss gone away, and there will be much more of trinking in ta island, and it will be a great difference, mirover. And she will be so far away that no one will see her no more—far away beyond ta Sound of Sleat, and far away beyond Oban, as I hef heard people say. And what will she do in London, when she has no boat at all, and she will never go out to ta fishing? And I will hear people say that you will walk a whole day and never come to ta sea, and what will Miss Sheila do for that? And she will tame no more o' ta wild-ducks' young things, and she will find out no more o' ta nests in the rocks, and she will hef no more horns when the deer is killed, and she will go out no more to see ta cattle swim across Loch Roag when they go to ta sheilings. It will be all different, all different, now; and she will never see us no more. And it iss as bad as if you wass a poor man, Mr. Mackenzie, and had to let your sons and your daughters go away to America, and never come back no more. And she ta only one in your house! And it wass the son o' Mr. Macintyre of Sutherland he would hef married her, and come to live on ta island, and not hef Miss Sheila go away among strangers that doesna ken her family, and will put no store by her, no more than if she wass a fisherman's lass. It wass Miss Sheila herself had a sore heart tis morning when she went away; and she turned and she looked at Borva as the boat came away, and I said, Tis iss the last time Miss Sheila will be in her boat, and she will not come no more again to Borva."

Mr. Mackenzie heard not one word or syllable of all this. The dead, passionless look had fallen over the powerful features, and the deep-set eyes were gazing, not on the actual Loch Roag before them, but on the stormy sea that lies between Lewis and Skye, and on a vessel disappearing in the midst of the rain. It was by a sort of instinct that he guided this open boat through the channels, which were now getting broader as they neared the sea, and the tall and grave-faced keeper might have kept up his garrulous talk for hours without attracting a look or a word.

It was now the dusk of the evening, and wild and strange indeed was the scene around the solitary boat as it slowly moved along. Large islands—so large that any one of them might have been mistaken for the mainland—lay over the dark waters of the sea, remote, untenanted and silent. There were no white cottages along these rocky shores; only a succession of rugged cliffs and sandy bays, but half mirrored in the sombre water below. Down in the south the mighty shoulders and peaks of Suainabhal and its sister mountains were still darker than the darkening sky; and when at length the boat had got well out from the network of islands and fronted the broad waters of the Atlantic, the great plain of the western sea seemed already to have drawn around it the solemn mantle of the night.

"Will you go to Borvabost, Mr. Mackenzie, or will we run her into your own house?" asked Duncan—Borvabost being the name of the chief village on the island.

"I will not go on to Borvabost," said the old man peevishly. "Will they not have plenty to talk about at Borvabost?"

"And it iss no harm tat ta folk will speak of Miss Sheila," said the gillie with some show of resentment: "it iss no harm tey will be sorry she is gone away—no harm at all, for it wass many things tey had to thank Miss Sheila for; and now it will be all ferry different—"

"I tell you, Duncan Macdonald, to hold your peace!" said the old man, with a savage glare of the deep-set eyes; and then Duncan relapsed into a sulky silence and the boat held on its way.

In the gathering twilight a long gray curve of sand became visible, and into the bay thus indicated Mackenzie turned his small craft. This indentation of the island seemed as blank of human occupation as the various points and bays they had passed, but as they neared the shore a house came into sight, about half-way up the slope rising from the sea to the pasture-land above. There was a small stone pier jutting out at one portion of the bay, where a mass of rocks was imbedded in the white sand; and here at length the boat was run in, and Mackenzie helped the young girl ashore.

The two of them, leaving the gillie to moor the little vessel that had brought them from Callernish, went silently toward the shore, and up the narrow road leading to the house. It was a square, two-storied substantial building of stone, but the stone had been liberally oiled to keep out the wet, and the blackness thus produced had not a very cheerful look. Then, on this particular evening the scant bushes surrounding the house hung limp and dark in the rain, and amid the prevailing hues of purple, blue-green and blue the bit of scarlet coping running round the black house was wholly ineffective in relieving the general impression of dreariness and desolation.

The King of Borva walked into a large room, which was but partially lit by two candles on the table and by the blaze of a mass of peats in the stone fireplace, and threw himself into a big easy-chair. Then he suddenly seemed to recollect his companion, who was timidly standing near the door, with her shawl still round her head.

"Mairi," he said, "go and ask them to give you some dry clothes. Your box it will not be here for half an hour yet." Then he turned to the fire.

"But you yourself, Mr. Mackenzie, you will be ferry wet—"

"Never mind me, my lass: go and get yourself dried."

"But it wass Miss Sheila," began the girl diffidently—"it wass Miss Sheila asked me—she asked me to look after you, sir—"

With that he rose abruptly, and advanced to her and caught her by the wrist. He spoke quite quietly to her, but the girl's eyes, looking up at the stern face, were a trifle frightened.

"You are a ferry good little girl, Mairi," he said slowly, "and you will mind what I say to you. You will do what you like in the house, you will take Sheila's place as much as you like, but you will mind this—not to mention her name, not once. Now go away, Mairi, and find Scarlett Macdonald, and she will give you some dry clothes; and you will tell her to send Duncan down to Borvabost, and bring up John the Piper and Alister-nan-Each, and the lads of the Nighean dubh, if they are not gone home to Habost yet. But it iss John the Piper must come directly."

The girl went away to seek counsel of Scarlett Macdonald, Duncan's wife, and Mr. Mackenzie proceeded to walk up and down the big and half-lit chamber. Then he went to a cupboard, and put out on the table a number of tumblers and glasses, with two or three odd-looking bottles of Norwegian make, consisting of four semicircular tubes of glass meeting at top and bottom, leaving the centre of the vessel thus formed open. He stirred up the blazing peats in the fireplace. He brought down from a shelf a box filled with coarse tobacco, and put it on the table. But he was evidently growing impatient, and at last he put on his cap again and went out into the night.

The air blew cold in from the sea, and whistled through the bushes that Sheila had trained about the porch. There was no rain now, but a great and heavy darkness brooded overhead, and in the silence he could hear the breaking of the waves along the hard coast. But what was this other sound he heard, wild and strange in the stillness of the night—a shrill and plaintive cry that the distance softened until it almost seemed to be the calling of a human voice? Surely those were words that he heard, or was it only that the old, sad air spoke to him?—