But if Bucklaw could not offer any satisfactory objections to the delay of the Master in leaving Scotland, he did not the less suffer with impatience the state of inaction to which it confined him; and it was only the ascendency which his new companion had acquired over him that induced him to submit to a course of life so alien to his habits and inclinations.

“You were wont to be thought a stirring active young fellow, Master,” was his frequent remonstrance; “yet here you seem determined to live on and on like a rat in a hole, with this trifling difference, that the wiser vermin chooses a hermitage where he can find food at least; but as for us, Caleb’s excuses become longer as his diet turns more spare, and I fear we shall realise the stories they tell of the slother:  we have almost eat up the last green leaf on the plant, and have nothing left for it but to drop from the tree and break our necks.”

“Do not fear it,” said Ravenswood; “there is a fate watches for us, and we too have a stake in the revolution that is now impending, and which already has alarmed many a bosom.”

“What fate—­what revolution?” inquired his companion.  “We have had one revolution too much already, I think.”

Ravenswood interrupted him by putting into his hands a letter.

“Oh,” answered Bucklaw, “my dream’s out.  I thought I heard Caleb this morning pressing some unfortunate fellow to a drink of cold water, and assuring him it was better for his stomach in the morning than ale or brandy.”

“It was my Lord of A——­’s courier,” said Ravenswood, “who was doomed to experience his ostentatious hospitality, which I believe ended in sour beer and herrings.  Read, and you will see the news he has brought us.”  “I will as fast as I can,” said Bucklaw; “but I am no great clerk, nor does his lordship seem to be the first of scribes.”

The reader will peruse in, a few seconds, by the aid our friend Ballantyne’s types, what took Bucklaw a good half hour in perusal, though assisted by the Master of Ravenswood.  The tenor was as follows: 

“Right honourable our cousin: 

“Our hearty commendations premised, these come to assure you of the interest which we take in your welfare, and in your purpose towards its augmentation.  If we have been less active in showing forth our effective good-will towards you than, as a loving kinsman and blood-relative, we would willingly have desired, we request that you will impute it to lack fo opportunity to show our good-liking, not to any coldness of our will.  Touching your resolution to travel in foreign parts, as at this time we hold the same little advisable, in respect that your ill-willers may, according to the custom of such persons, impute motives for your journey, whereof, although we know and believe you to be as clear as ourselves, yet natheless their words may find credence in places where the belief in them may much prejudice you, and which we should see with more unwillingness and displeasure than with means of remedy.