'The greater is the cause of regret.'

'Now, Callum,' said I, 'let us have no more of this. You have tasked your strength enough for one day—and remember you have long been weak and ailing.'

'I have been struggling to give pride and pleasure to Minnie, and if I conquer, 'tis as much for her sake as for yours, Mac Innon. She pinned this cockade on my bonnet when I left her, and reminding me of the former prizes I had won, smiled on me, as she alone can smile; for Minnie is the fairest flower on the banks of the Ora. But what seeks this red-legged partridge here?' he continued, in Gaelic.

This was applied to the valet of Sir Horace, Mr. Jeames Toodles, who, notwithstanding the splendour of his livery, his red plush nether habiliments, laced hat and heraldic buttons, approached timidly to say, that 'Sir 'Orace vished that ere thingumbob lifted again, if the gentlemen had no objections.'

Callum gave the liveryman a withering glance, and touching his bonnet to the ladies, pushed the clach off the lower block with one hand.

'Oh, papa,' exclaimed Miss Everingham, 'how can you be so cruel as to ask this? Don't you see that the poor man looks quite faint, after all he has done already?'

'Never mind,' said the baronet, from his well-stuffed carriage; 'up with it again, my man, and here is a sovereign for you!'

While something like an emotion of rage and humiliation made the eyes of my fosterer flash fire, he snatched up the ponderous clach, and after poising it aloft for a moment, while he trembled in every limb, while every muscle and fibre strained and stood like cords and wires of iron, and while the perspiration oozed from every opening pore, he dashed it down upon the lower block, and shivered it into fifty fragments.

I saw that he was deathly pale, when Mr. Jeames Toodles approached him with the sovereign, but whether in anger, or that his strength had been wantonly overtasked, I know not—probably both. Disdaining to touch the coin, the poor half-starved fox-hunter said to the valet, with a glance of quiet contempt—

'Put that in your pocket, my friend, and thank your master for me. Dioul!' he added, in Gaelic, 'does this man think to pay us like English rope-dancers, or the fellow who squeaks in Punch's box at the fair? Air Dhia! we have not yet come to that!'