KATE HILLARD.

THE BERKSHIRE LADY.

To the Editor of Lippincot’s Magazine: 

SIR:  There are few pleasanter ways of passing a desultory hour than haphazard reading amongst old numbers of a good magazine.  I say advisedly “a desultory hour,” for when it comes to more than that the habit is apt to become demoralizing.  And, excellent as many English magazines are, I must own that for this particular purpose I give the preference to our American cousins.  It would not be easy to say precisely why, but so it is.  One feels lighter after them than one does after the same time given to their English confreres.  It may be that there is more abandon, more tumbling in them—­much more of that borderland writing (if one may use the phrase) so good, as I think, for magazine purposes, which you skim with a kind of titillating doubt in your mind whether it is jest or earnest—­whether you are to take seriously, or the writer intended you to take seriously, what he is telling you; and so you may drop into a sort of dreamy Alice-in-Wonderland state, prepared to accept whatever comes next in a purely receptive condition, and without any desire to ask questions.

It was in such a frame of mind, and with considerable satisfaction, that I found myself some time since sitting in a friend’s house with a spare corner of time on my hands, in a comfortable armchair, and a number of old Lippincotts on the table by my side, the odds and ends of the collection of a young countrywoman of mine of literary and Transatlantic tastes.  I glanced through some half dozen numbers taken up at hazard, recognizing here and there an old friend—­for I have been an on-and-off reader in these pages for years—­and getting just pleasantly pricked with a number of new ideas, as to which I felt no responsibility—­no need of ticketing or labeling or packing them—­when I came suddenly upon a paper which sharply roused me from my mood of laisser aller.  It was by your accomplished and amusing contributor Lady Blanche Murphy, and the subject just such a one as one would wish to happen on under the circumstances—­Slains Castle, one of the oldest and most romantic of the grim palace-keeps which are dotted over Scotland, round which legends cluster so thick that there is not one of their towers, scarcely a slender old mullioned window, which is not specially connected with some stirring tale of love, war or crime.  But Slains stands pre-eminent among Scotch castles on other grounds, and has an interest which the doings of the earls of Errol, its lords, could never have won for it.  The Wizard of the North has thrown his spell over it, and, whether Sir Walter Scott intended it or not, Slains is accepted now as the Elangowan Castle in Guy Mannering.

Now, with all these rich stores to work on, these exceeding many flocks and herds of Northern legend and glamour, Lady Blanche should surely have been content, and not have descended into the South of England, upon a quiet country-house in Berkshire, to seize its one ewe lamb and claim that the heroine of the story which I hope to tell before I get to the end of my paper was none other than the termagant Countess Mary, hereditary lord high constable of Scotland, and the owner of Slains Castle at the beginning of last century.