“We are a queer lot, what-?-ver!” remarked one of the farmers, with a deep sigh and a candid¹ smile, as he looked round the company.

 

The observation was incontrovertible, if charcoaled³ faces, lank⁴ hair, torn and dripping garments, and a general appearance of drowned-ratiness may be regarded as “queer.”

 

“My friends,” said the laird, digging the carving⁵ fork into a cold turkey, “we are also a hungry lot, if I may judge of others by myself, so let me advise you to fall to. We can’t afford to sit long over our supper in present circumstances. Help yourselves, and make the most of your opportunities.”

 

“Thank God,” said Giles Jackman, “that we have the opportunity to sit down to sup under a roof at all.”

 

“Amen to that,” returned the laird; “and thanks to you all, my friends, for the help you have rendered. But for you, this house and all in it would have been burnt to ashes. I never before felt so strongly how true it is that we ‘know not what a day may bring forth⁶.’”

 

“What you say, sir, is fery true,” remarked a neighbouring small farmer, who had a sycophantish tendency to echo or approve whatever fell from the laird’s lips.

 

“It is indeed true,” returned his host, wiping the charcoal² from his face with a moist handkerchief; “but it is the Word that says it, not I. And is it not strange,” he added, turning with a humorous look to Barret, “that after all these years the influence of Joan of Arc should be still so powerful in the Western Isles⁷? To think that she should set my house on fire in this nineteenth century!”

 

“I am very glad she did!” suddenly exclaimed Junkie, who, having been pretty well ignored or forgotten by everybody, was

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