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An hour later Colin turned in with a panel that seemed made of moonlight. "How on earth did you do it?" I said. "It is as though you had drawn up the moon in a silver bucket from the bottom of a fairy well." "No, no," he protested; "I know better. But where is your clair de lune?" "Nothing doing," I answered. "Well, then, say those lines you wrote a week or two ago instead."

Sir Colin was now left, exclusive of a small body of Turks who still kept their ground, with scarcely six hundred men to defend the approach to Balaclava. The veteran general felt the gravity of the occasion; but his stout heart did not quail, for he knew well that the brave men under him would stand firm.

"Ay, ay, Sir Colin, we'll do that," came the ready response. Now, it was usual, in preparing to receive a cavalry charge, for soldiers to be formed in a hollow square; but on this occasion Sir Colin ranged his men, two deep, in a thin red line, which has become memorable in the annals of the British army.

Robert Drury reeled in, hiccuping a maudlin ballad about "Tib and young Colin, one fine day, beneath the haycock shade-a," &c., &c., and cursing to find his fire gone out, and all in darkness. Liquor was ever his master, and to- day the King's health had been a fair excuse.

It is no use my thinking of going after the column, for they would be some fifty miles away from the place where we left them by to morrow night. If I can get a good horse I may be at Lucknow by midday to-morrow. The horses have all had a rest to-day. Sir Colin will, I am sure, send off at once, and the troops will march well to effect a rescue.

Dickon took his spade and dug the hole deeper and wider than a new digger with thin white hands could make it. Mary slipped out to run and bring back a watering-can. When Dickon had deepened the hole Colin went on turning the soft earth over and over. He looked up at the sky, flushed and glowing with the strangely new exercise, slight as it was.

'Now you look here, said John Jervase, heavily and solidly, 'I've had pretty nearly two years to think this thing over in. I've done wrong, and I own up to it There's my boy, Polly, as is recommended for the Victoria Cross by Sir Colin Campbell, and fetched you out of the fire under the Malakoff, so I'm told, as if you'd been his very born brother.

The events and situations of life resemble ocean waves every one is alike and yet every one is different. It was just so at Crawford Keep after Colin left it. The usual duties of the day were almost as regular as the clock, but little things varied them. There were letters or no letters from Colin; there were little events at the works or in the village; the dominie called or he did not call.

"Well," says Henderland, "they're disarmed or supposed to be for there's still a good deal of cold iron lying by in quiet places. And then Colin Campbell has the sogers coming. But for all that, if I was his lady wife, I wouldna be well pleased till I got him home again. They're queer customers, the Appin Stewarts." I asked if they were worse than their neighbours. "No' they," said he.

"Death hath moulded into calm completeness The statue of their life." Charles Frederick Mackenzie was born in 1825 of an old Scottish Tory family, members from the first of the Scottish Church in the days of her persecution. His father, Colin Mackenzie, was one of Walter Scott's fellow-Clerks of Session, and is commemorated by one of the Introductions to "Marmion," as