“The heir’s a wise-like lad, and a braw lad,” said the old folks of the clachan, patronizingly.  “He’s no that ill the noo, and he’ll aiblins grow the better, ye ken; but naibody that comes after will be like him.  We’ll ne’er see anither Earl o’ Cairnforth.”

The same words which Mr. Menteith and the rest had said when the earl was born, but with what a different meaning!

Lord Cairnforth came back among his own people amid a transport of welcome.  Though he had been long away, Mrs. Bruce and other assistants had carried out his plans and orders so successfully that the estate had not suffered for his absence.  In the whole extent of it was now little or no poverty; none like that which, in his youth, had startled Lord Cairnforth into activity upon hearing the story of the old shepherd of Loch Mhor.  There was plenty of work, and hands to do it, along the shores of both lochs; new farms had sprung up, and new roads been made; churches and schools were built as occasion required; and though the sheep had been driven a little higher up the mountains, and the deer and grouse fled farther back into the inland moors, still Cairnforth village was a lovely spot, inhabited by a contented community.  Civilization could bring to it no evils that were not counteracted by two strong influences—­(stronger than any one can conceive who does not understand the peculiarities almost feudal in their simplicity, of country parish life in Scotland)—­a minister like Mr. Cardross, and a resident proprietor like the Earl of Cairnforth.

The earl arrived a few days before the festival day, and spent the time in going over his whole property from one end to the other.  He took Mrs. Bruce with him.  “I can’t want you for a day now, Helen,” said he, and made her sit beside him in his carriage, which, by dint of various modern appliances, he could now travel in far easier than he used to do, or else asked her to drive him in the old familiar pony-chaise along the old familiar hill-side roads, whence you look down on ether loch—­ sometimes on both—­lying like a sheet of silver below.

Man a drive they took every day, the weather being still and clam, as it often is at Cairnforth, by fits and snatches, all winter through.

“I think there never was such a place as this place,” the earl would often say, when he stopped at particular points of view, and gazed his fill on every well-known outline of the hills and curve of the lochs, generally ending with a smiling look on the face beside him, equally familiar, which had watched all these things with him for more than thirty years.  “Helen, I have had a happy life, or it seems so, looking back upon it.  Remember, I said this, and let no one ever say the contrary.”

And in all the houses they visited—­farm, cottage, or bothie—­ every body noticed how exceedingly happy the earl looked, how cheerfully he spoke, and how full of interest he was in every thing around him.