at the Schloss, and the Captain of them, he is in with the Herr, and has forgotten his manners, and has drawn his sword, and is brandishing it before the eyes of the Herr, and the Herr stands fixed to the spot, and doesn't move an inch; for he knows about as much of French as the cow does of Sunday.' "The devil!" said my father, and jumped up, for he was a quick, determined man, and did not know what fear meant. When he entered the room, the Frenchman was rushing about like a wild beast, and the words came sputtering out of his mouth like the beer from a barrel without a bung. The Amtshauptmann was standing quite still, and had his French pocket dictionary in his hand, and whenever he caught a word the Frenchman said, he turned over the leaves to see what the dictionary made of it, and when my father came in, he asked: "My friend, what does the fellow want? Eh!... Ask the fellow what he wants." My father thereupon began to speak to the Frenchman, but he was so loud and vehement, shouted and gesticulated so much, that the old Amtshauptmann asked: "What is he so excited for, friend?" Well, at last my father got out of the Frenchman what it was he wanted: "Fifteen fat oxen, and a load of corn, and seven hundred ells of green cloth, and a hundred louis d'ors; "-and a great deal "doo vang" (as my father told the Amtshauptmann) for himself and his men besides. "My friend," then said the old Herr, "tell the fellow he is a scound 66 Stop!" cried my father, "don't say that word, Herr Amtshauptmann, he will often have heard it lately, and maybe he understands it. No, I advise that we should give him plenty doo vang' now; it will be time enough to think of the rest afterwards." And the Herr Amtshauptmann agreed, and ordered Fritz Sahlmann to get glasses and wine from Mamsell Westphalen, "but not the best." Well, the wine comes, and my father fills the Frenchman's glass and the Frenchman fills my father's, and they drink and fill alternately, and my father soon says: "Herr Amtshauptmann, you must sit down too and help me, for this fellow is a cask without a bottom." "My friend," answered the Amtshauptmann, "I am an old man and the chief justiciary in his Grace's bailiwick of Stemhagen; it is not fitting that I should sit and drink with this fellow." "Yes," said my father, "but Necessity knows no law; and besides, this is for our country. And so the old Herr sat down and did his best. But after some time my father said: "Herr Amtshauptmann, the fellow is too many for us; what a mercy it would be if we could get hold of some one with a strong head." And as he said this, there came a knock at the door. "Come in." "Good day," says old Miller Voss of Gielow coming in, "good day, Herr Amtshauptmann." "Good day, Miller, what is the matter now?" "Oh! Herr, I have come again about my lawsuit." "There's no more time for that to-day; you see the position we are in." But my father cried out: "Voss, come here, and do a Christian deed. Just seat yourself by this Frenchman and drink him down." Miller Voss looked first at my father and then at the Amtshauptmann, and thought to himself: "I've never been at a session like this before; but nevertheless he soon found himself at home in it. 99 My father now goes to the Amtshauptmann, and says: "Herr Amtshauptmann, this is our man; he will finish the fellow; I know him." "Good," said the old Herr, "but how are we to get rid of the six fellows out there in the courtyard?" "They are but a band of ruffians and marauders," replied my father; "only let me do as I like, and I will soon get rid of them;" and he called Fritz Sahlmann and said: "Fritz, my lad, go down through the Schloss garden, -mind no one sees you, -and run to Droz the watchmaker; he is to put on his uniform and his black leggings and bearskin and sword and gun, and slip across the garden through the little green gate to the corner window, and then cough." Now as concerns Droz the watchmaker, he was by birth a Neufchatelois; he had served under many flags, amongst them the French, and at last had come to a halt in my native town, where he had married a widow and settled. He had hung up his French uniform, and in the evening twilight, when it was too dark to see to mend watches, he used to put it on and strut up and down his little room, but with his head bare, as the ceiling was too low for him to wear his bearskin. And then he would talk about "la grande nation" and "le grand Empereur" and command the division: Right wheel: Left wheel: Right about face: till his wife and children crept behind the bed for fear. But he was a good man and would not hurt a fly, and the next day "la grande nation" would be safe in the cupboard, and he mending away at his watches and eating Mecklenburg dumplings dipped in the fat of Mecklenburg bacon. Well, while the watchmaker was buttoning on his leggings and putting on his bearskin, Miller Voss sat drinking with the Frenchman, both working well at the Amtshauptmann's red wine, and the Frenchman clinked glasses with the Miller and said: "A vous !" and the Miller then took his glass, drank, and said: "Pooh, pooh!" and then the Miller clinked glasses with the Frenchman, and the Frenchman thanked him and said: "Serviteur," and then the Miller drank again and said: "Rasc'lly cur!" And in this way they went on drinking and talking French together. Gradually they became more and more friendly, and the Frenchman put his sword in its sheath, and before very long they were in each other's arms. At this moment a cough was heard under the corner window, and my father stole out and gave the watchmaker directions what he was to do. But the Herr Amtshauptmann kept walking up and down, wondering what the Duke would say to all this if he were to see it, and said to the Miller: "Miller, don't give in, I will not forget you." And the Miller did not give in, but drank sturdily on. Meanwhile the watchmaker went stealthily back again through the Schloss garden, and when he came on to the road leading up to the Schloss, he slapped himself on the breast and drew himself up to his full height, for he was now "grande nation" again, and he marched in at the Schloss gate in military style, which suited him well, for he was a fine-looking fellow. The six Chasseurs, who were standing by their horses, looked at him and whispered together, and one of them went after him and demanded whence he came and whither he was going. But Droz looked scornfully over his shoulder at him. and answered him sharply and shortly in French that he was the quartermaster of the seventy-third Regiment, and that it would be up from Malchin in half an hour, and he must first of all speak to "Monsieur le Baillif." The Chasseur turned pale, and as Droz began to talk about marauders and related how his Captain had had a couple shot the day before, first one and then another jumped on to his horse, and although a few did chatter together for a moment or two and pointed to the Schloss, yet none of them felt inclined to stay any longer, and almost before you could lift your finger the courtyard was empty. And we boys stood at the Brandenburg gate and watched the six French Chasseurs as they floundered about in the mud, for it was just the season for the Mecklenburg roads, being the spring, and the thaw having just set in. MARJORIE FLEMING. BY DR. JOHN BROWN. [JOHN BROWN: A Scotch physician and author; born in Lanarkshire, September, 1810; died May 11, 1882. He was one of the chief doctors of Edinburgh, taking his M.D. at that university in 1883; and the author of "Horæ Subseciva" (Leisure Hours) (1858, 1861, 1882), a volume of essays and sketches, containing the ever-popular “Rab and his Friends,” “Pet Marjorie,” etc.] ONE November afternoon in 1810-the year in which "Waverley" was resumed and laid aside again, to be finished off, its last two volumes in three weeks, and made immortal in 1814, and when its author, by the death of Lord Melville, narrowly escaped getting a civil appointment in India-three men, evidently lawyers, might have been seen escaping like schoolboys from the Parliament House, and speeding arm in arm down Bank Street and the Mound, in the teeth of a surly blast of sleet. The three friends sought the bield of the low wall old Edinburgh boys remember well, and sometimes miss now, as they struggled with the stout west wind. The three were curiously unlike each other. One, "a little man of feeble make, who would be unhappy if his pony got beyond a foot pace," slight, with "small, elegant features, hectic cheek, and soft hazel eyes, the index of the quick, sensitive spirit within, as if he had the warm heart of a woman, her genuine enthusiasm, and some of her weaknesses." Another, as unlike a woman as a man can be; homely, almost common, in look and figure; his hat and his coat, and indeed his entire covering, worn to the quick, but all of the best material; what redeemed him from vulgarity and meanness were his eyes, deep set, heavily thatched, keen, hungry, shrewd, with a slumbering glow far in, as if they could be dangerous; a man to care nothing for at first glance, but somehow, to give a second and notforgetting look at. The third was the biggest of the three, and, though lame, nimble and all rough and alive with power; had you met him anywhere else, you would say he was a Liddesdale store farmer, come of gentle blood; "a stout, blunt carle," as he says of himself, with the swing and stride and the eye of a man of the hills, —a large, sunny, out-of-door air all about him. On his broad and somewhat stooping shoulders, was set that head which, with Shakespeare's and Bonaparte's, is the best known in all the world. He was in high spirits, keeping his companions and himself in roars of laughter, and every now and then seizing them, and stopping, that they might take their fill of the fun; there they stood shaking with laughter, "not an inch of their body free from its grip. At George Street they parted, one to Rose Court, behind St. Andrew's Church, one to Albany Street, the other, our big and limping friend, to Castle Street. We need hardly give their names. The first was William Erskine, afterwards Lord Kinnedder, chased out of the world by a calumny, killed by its foul breath, And at the touch of wrong, without a strife There is nothing in literature more beautiful or more pathetic than Scott's love and sorrow for this friend of his youth. - The second was William Clerk, the Darsie Latimer of "Redgauntlet," "a man," as Scott says, "of the most acute intellects and powerful apprehension," but of more powerful indolence, so as to leave the world with little more than the report of what he might have been, a humorist as genuine, though not quite so savagely Swiftian, as his brother, Lord Eldin, neither of whom had much of that commonest and best of all the humors, called good. The third we all know. What has he not done for every one of us? Who else ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely? We are fain to say, not even Shakespeare, for his is something deeper than diversion, something higher than pleasure, and yet who would care to split this hair? Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a change he would see! The bright, broad laugh, |