Beauty is not rare

In the land of Paddy,
Fair beyond compare

Is Peg of Limavaddy.'
This cheered us a bit; but the wind sighed in the trees, the rain

dripped on the window panes, and we felt for the first time a
consciousness of home-longing. Francesca sat on a low stool,

looking into the fire, Ronald's last letter in her lap, and it was
easy indeed to see that her heart was in the Highlands. She has

been giving us a few extracts from the communication, an unusual
proceeding, as Ronald, in his ordinary correspondence, is evidently

not a quotable person. We smiled over his account of a visit to his
old parish of Inchcaldy in Fifeshire. There is a certain large

orphanage in the vicinity, in which we had all taken an interest,
chiefly because our friends the Macraes of Pettybaw House were among

its guardians.
It seems that Lady Rowardennan of the Castle had promised the

orphans, en bloc, that those who passed through an entire year
without once falling into falsehood should have a treat or festival

of their own choosing. On the eventful day of decision, those
orphans, male and female, who had not for a twelve-month deviated

from the truth by a hair's-breadth, raised their little white hands
(emblematic of their pure hearts and lips), and were solemnly

counted. Then came the unhappy moment when a scattering of small
grimy paws was timidly put up, and their falsifying owners confessed

that they had fibbed more than once during the year. These tearful
fibbers were also counted, and sent from the room, while the non-

fibbers chose their reward, which was to sail around the Bass Rock
and the Isle of May in a steam tug.

On the festival day, the matron of the orphanage chanced on the
happy thought that it might have a moral effect on the said fibbers

to see the non-fibbers depart in a blaze of glory; so they were
taken to the beach to watch the tug start on its voyage. The

confessed criminals looked wretched enough, Ronald wrote, when
forsaken by their virtuous playmates, who stepped jauntily on board,

holding their sailor hats on their heads and carrying nice little
luncheon baskets; so miserablyunhappy, indeed, did they seem that

certain sympathetic and ill-balanced persons sprang to their relief,
providing them with sandwiches, sweeties, and pennies. It was a

lovely day, and when the fibbers' tears were dried they played
merrily on the sand, their games directed and shared by the

aforesaid misguided persons.
Meantime a high wind had sprung up at sea, and the tug was tossed to

and fro upon the foamy deep. So many and so varied were the ills of
the righteous orphans that the matron could not attend to all of

them properly, and they were laid on benches or on the deck, where
they languidly declined luncheon, and wept for a sight of the land.

At five the tug steamed up to the home landing. A few of the
voyagers were able to walk ashore, some were assisted, others were

carried; and as the pale, haggard, truthful company gathered on the
beach, they were met by a boisterous, happy crowd of Ananiases and

Sapphiras, sunburned, warm, full of tea and cakes and high spirits,
and with the moral law already so uncertain in their minds that at

the sight of the suffering non-liars it tottered to its fall.
Ronald hopes that Lady Rowardennan and the matron may perhaps have

gained some useful experience by the incident, though the orphans,
truthful and untruthful, are hopelessly mixed in their views of

right-doing.
He is staying now at the great house of the neighbourhood, while his

new manse is being put in order. Roderick, the piper, he says, has
a grand collection of pipe tunes given him by an officer of the

Black Watch. Francesca, when she and Ronald visit the Castle on
their wedding journey, is to have 'Johnnie Cope' to wake her in the

morning, 'Brose and Butter' just before dinner is served, a reel, a
strathspey, and a march while the meal is going on, and, last of

all, the 'Highland Wedding.' Ronald does not know whether there are
any Lowland Scots or English words to this pipe tune, but it is

always played in the Highlands after the actual marriage, and the
words in Gaelic are, 'Alas for me if the wife I have married is not

a good one, for she will eat the food and not do the work!'
"You don't think Ronald meant anything personal in quoting that?" I

asked Francesca teasingly; but she shot me such a reproachful look
that I hadn't the heart to persist, her face was so full of self-

distrust and love and longing.
What creatures of sense we are, after all; and in certain moods, of

what avail is it if the beloved object is alive, safe, loyal, so
long as he is absent? He may write letters like Horace Walpole or

Chesterfield--better still, like Alfred de Musset, or George Sand,
or the Brownings; but one clasp of the hand that moved the pen is

worth an ocean of words! You believe only in the etherealised, the
spiritualised passion of love; you know that it can exist through

years of separation, can live and grow where a coarser feeling would
die for lack of nourishment; still though your spirit should be

strong enough to meet its spirit mate somewhere in the realms of
imagination, and the bodily presence ought not really to be

necessary, your stubborn heart of flesh craves sight and sound and
touch. That is the only pitiless part of death, it seems to me. We

have had the friendship, the love, the sympathy, and these are
things that can never die; they have made us what we are, and they

are by their very nature immortal; yet we would come near to
bartering all these spiritual possessions for the 'touch of a

vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that is still.'
How could I ever think life easy enough to be ventured on alone! It

is so beautiful to feel oneself of infinite value to one other human
creature; to hear beside one's own step the tread of a chosen

companion on the same road. And if the way be dusty or the hills
difficult to climb, each can say to the other, 'I love you, dear;

lean on me and walk in confidence. I can always be counted on,
whatever happens.'

Chapter XIX. 'In ould Donegal.'
'Here's a health to you, Father O'Flynn!

Slainte, and slainte, and slainte agin;
Pow'rfulest preacher and tenderest teacher,

And kindliest creature in ould Donegal.'
Alfred Perceval Graves.

Coomnageeha Hotel,
In Ould Donegal.

It is a far cry from the kingdom of Kerry to 'ould Donegal,' where
we have been travelling for a week, chiefly in the hope of meeting

Father O'Flynn. We miss our careless, genial, ragged, southern
Paddy just a bit; for he was a picturesque, likable figure, on the

whole, and easier to know than this Ulster Irishman, the product of
a mixed descent.

We did not stop long in Belfast; for if there is anything we detest,
when on our journeys, it is to mix too much with people of industry,

thrift, and business sagacity. Sturdy, prosperous, calculating,
well-to-do Protestants are well enough in their way, and undoubtedly

they make a very good backbone for Ireland; but we crave something
more romantic than the citizen virtues, or we should have remained

in our own country, where they are tolerably common, although we
have not as yet anything approaching over-production.

Belfast, it seems, is, and has always been, a centre of
Presbyterianism. The members of the Presbytery protested against

the execution of Charles I., and received an irate reply from
Milton, who said that 'the blockish presbyters of Clandeboy' were

'egregious liars and impostors,' who meant to stir up rebellion
'from their unchristian synagogue at Belfast in a barbarous nook of

Ireland.'
Dr. La Touche writes to Salemina that we need not try to understand

all the religious and political complications which surround us.
They are by no means as violent or as many as in Thackeray's day,

when the great English author found nine shades of politico-
religious differences in the Irish Liverpool. As the impartial

observer must, in such a case, necessarilydisplease eight parties,
and probably the whole nine, Thackeray advised a rigid abstinence

from all intellectualcuriosity. Dr. La Touche says, if we wish to
know the north better, it will do us no harm to study the Plantation

of Ulster, the United Irish movement, Orangeism, Irish Jacobitism,