It was not wonderful that the little earl loved her, and that under her sunshiny soul his life too blossomed out as it might never otherwise have done, but have drooped and faded, and gone back into the darkness, imperfect and unfulfilled; for, though each human life is, in a sense, complete to itself, and must work itself out independently, clinging to no other, still there is a great and beautiful mystery in the way one life seems to influence an other, sometimes for ill, but far, far oftener for good.

Lord Cairnforth was not much with the Cardross boys.  He liked them, and evidently craved after their company, but they were very shy of him.  Sometimes they let Malcolm bring him into their boat, and condescended to row him up and down the loch, a mode of locomotion in which he greatly delighted, for, at best, the shaking of the great lumbering coach was not easy to him, and he always begged to be carried in Malcolm’s arms till he found how pleasantly he could lie in the stern of the Manse boat, and float about on the smooth water, watching the mountains and the shores.

True, he could not stir an inch from where he was laid down, but he lay there so contentedly, enjoying everything, and really looked, what he often said he was, “as happy as a king.”

And by degrees, with a little home persuasion from Helen, the boys got reconciled to his company—­found, indeed, that he was not such bad company after all; for often, when they were tired of pulling, and let the boat drift into some quiet little bay, or rock lazily in the middle of the loch, the little earl would begin talking—­telling stories, which soon caught the attention of the minister’s boys.  These were either fragments out of the books he had read, which seemed countless to the young Cardrosses, or, what they liked still better, tales “out of his own head;” and these tales were always the last that they would have expected from one like him—­wild exploits; wanderings over South American prairies, or shipwrecks on desert islands; astonishing feats of riding, or fighting, or traveling by land and sea—­every thing, in short, belonging to that sort of active, energetic, adventurous life, of which the relator could never have had the least experience, and never would have in this world.  Perhaps for that very reason his fancy delighted therein the more.

And his stories were enjoyed by others as much as by himself, which no doubt added to the charm of them.  When winter came, and all the boating days were done, many a night, round the fire of the Manse parlor, or in the “awful eerie” library at the Castle, the earl used to have a whole circle of young people, and some elder ones too, gathered round his wheel-chair, listening to his wonderful tales of adventure by flood and field.

“Why don’t you write them out properly?” the boys would ask sometimes, forgetting—­what Helen would never have forgotten.  But he only looked down on his poor helpless fingers and smiled.