ཕ་ =, Every Saturday, THE MINISTER'S SANDY AND JESS. were fatally depressing the balance in which hung | made no account of Birkholm's attentions to her, the fortunes of her life. Adam Spottiswoode of Birkholm liked Jess, and there was no constraint on his will beyond the influence of his three sisters, whom he could shake off or bring round to submission at his pleasure. Jess Stewart would be a poor, but not an unsuitable mate for the Laird of Birkholm; and far beyond the consideration of the white house at Birkholm being a grand down-setting for a portionless bride, Jess liked the comely, courteous, frank young laird, not half so clever as Jess herself, or Sandy, but attractive by the goodly glamour of his superior birth and breeding, with the manly, honorable character corresponding to it. Adam Spottiswoode and Jess Stewart had a kindness for each other; but so long as it was no more than a kindness, or tender fancy, it was no stigma on their liking to say that, if the couple had no opportunity of meeting, it would die the death of starvation,-gradually on the woman's part, more rapidly on the man's. There should be a middle ground for the liking to wax into love. There was no middle ground left to the couple; for the kirk, where Birkholm took his seat in the Birkholm loft, fronting the minister's bucht, and where he and Jess were not always so engrossed with the sermon (in spite of Jess's despotism to other people with regard to their treatment of the "heads") as they should have been, was not a middle ground. -- and because they had forgotten similar passages in their And if Birkholm were utterly lost to Jess, or if II. WHAT SANDY WAS. "To desert his post and renounce the highest to starve, or feed off the great as a painter of false faces, an idolater commission a man can carry, of stocks and stones,-give me patience.” Poor Jess had no longer gloves, shoes, sashes, to go to the subscription balls in the Woodend and the parties in the country-houses: and when the manse family had to dismiss one of the servants, and Jess's hands got red and her face blowsy with continued housework and garden-work, she felt more and more that, without the commonest finishes to her toilette, she was no longer fit to appear in refined society and be Birkholm's chosen partner. Birkholm attempted one great advance. Spas not foreign spas, were then the height of fashion, but native, and not so much as fountains of health, but as favorite resorts, where men and women saw the world, met every morning in the pump-room, drove together every afternoon, two by two, in high-pitched gigs, to all the show-houses and breezy views in the neighborhood, and danced together a couple of long country-dances without sitting down, under the countenance of a master of the ceremonies in pumps, and with the powder in his hair not blown away by the tempest of the French RevoluBut Mr. Stewtion. Birkholm bribed an accommodating married It was not that Mr. Stewart had any puritanical cousin and one of his sisters, by their share of the gayety, to invite Jess Stewart to accompany them for a fortnight to one of the Wells. The excursion scruples as to the lawfulness of art. would have been like an admission to the Elysian art had no scruple as to the lawfulness of dancing, fields, with the temple of Hymen at the end of the and that would not have reconciled him greatly to principal vista, to Jess. It would have been the Sandy's becoming a dancing-master. Actually, old gala of the girl's life, and she would assuredly have M. Le Roy, the dancing-master, had a far more come home from it engaged to Birkholm, and count-accredited and dignified position, both socially and ing herself, with reason, the happiest woman in the world. But noblesse oblige in all noble ranks. The pro- The minister had need of patience when he received the letter with the tidings that Sandy, after passing through four of his years at college, with what effort the family knew, had abandoned the Mrs. Stewart and Jess were amazed and appalled ministry and adopted the profession of a painter. It is difficult to measure at present the headlong beyond presuming to say a word. downfall of Sandy in those good people's estimation. Though they were familiar with his passion from his earliest years, they had not once contemplated the probability of his taking to painting as a calling. painters who had found their way there. And it morally, at Woodend than any of the poor portraitwas not the poverty of the trade that was its crowning drawback. ScotchThe minister, like all wise, honest men men particularly-had a due respect for wealth and its power; but the ministers of the Kirk of Scotland had also need to be disinterested, and their hardy habits of mind and body were not much affected by the prospect of poverty. But though the minister had little doubt that Sandy would starve, or lead a life of miserable dependence, perhaps vicious compromise, it would not have made a blessing out into the world, which is generally cold enough for a penniless painter, taking no more with him than the stick and the wallet of one of the wandering apprentices of the kindly land of Wilhelm Meister. the heir of the promises, under the serene sky of Palestine, rather like an Esau, getting his death of cold, shivering under the gray clouds and the bleak wind, by the bare Scottish roadside. material difference in this case had the minister been acquainted with the changes in the world which put a moderate competence within Sandy's reach, and caused the step he had taken to be within the bounds of right reason. Sandy was right that, in the Edinburgh of the day, not only was there a When the minister returned and found his son's wonderful and glorious maiden literature among place vacant, he must have guessed that Sandy was "the writer lads," whom the minister classed to-gone; but he made no sign. Wandering apprengether rather contemptuously, but painting, as an tices are generally good pedestrians, and wonderfulart, for the first time coyly blushed and smiled as a ly endowed with friends; but when the first touch true sister of the belles lettres, which Mr. Stewart's of frost nipped Mrs. Stewart's gillyflowers that night, cloth did not altogether despise when Robertson Sandy's mother dreamt of him lying down like wrote history and Blair rhetoric. Runciman's paint-Jacob, with a stone for a pillow, but unlike Jacob, ing of the Clerks of Penicuik's house seemed to promise a new era never attained, such as prevailed at Venice when Tintoretto and Paul Veronese painted marble palaces both within and without. Better still, a national academy was really to confer status and impart instruction where youthful genius was concerned. But what was the struggling infanсу of art to the minister, who indulged in the pictorial faculty in his own way, and quite another way, by drawing Sandy, as he had fondly hoped, stand-line, ing up severe in youthful beauty, not unlike one of Milton's archangels, swaying by the breath of his mouth, for their salvation, multitudes in simple country kirks, or in what the Reformation had spared of rich abbeys and cathedrals in towns and cities; and again, Sandy, haggard, and sordid, and soiled, haggling with Jewish dealers, whom Mr. Stewart confounded with pawn-brokers; or journeying wearily from town to town, taking in scanty orders, and flattering obsequiously the owners of the puffed-up, vulgar, mean faces, which he copied with secret disgust? The door of the manse was thenceforth shut against Sandy; his name became a forbidden sound, not only as that of "a stickit minister," — and the Scotch, with grim humor, deride a failure in proportion as they applaud an achievement in a favorite but as an ill-doer. Neighbors carefully avoided mentioning Sandy to his family, while they talked loudly among themselves, and pitied the poor Stewarts for the sore hearts they had got from the prodigality and ingratitude of their only son. The minister strove manfully not to visit his pain on the blameless women-folk. He was so far left to himself as to call Andro "a pompous idiot," and the herd an impudent blackguard"; but they were of the same sex as the delinquent, and in that light fair game. He refrained from ebullitions of temper to his wife and daughter, and was considerate, forbearing, almost caressing, to poor Mrs. Stewart, who, in Mr. Stewart did not absolutely forbid Sandy his her coming and going about her house, was forever course, or threaten him with utter reprobation if he coming in contact with the empty kist which had pursued it, because the minister's reasonable soul, passed to and fro for many happy years, as they in the middle of his wrath and mortification, revolt-looked now, stored with her choicest provisions for ed at violence. He wrote to his son in stern reproach and rebuke. Sandy defended himself like a creature at bay, and refused to force himself into the priesthood, for which Providence could not have designed him, since he had not the necessary qualifications. Mr. Stewart, beside himself, accused Sandy of going nigh to blaspheming, of proposing to take Providence into his own hands. Afterwards, Sandy came home for a few days; a wretched visit, when his father never addressed him directly beyond help ing him at table, and his mother "lookit in his face" as if her gaze would melt stone. Sandy was now as stone to his father; for the sweet temper of the lad had been goaded and driven to the point when sweet tempers steel themselves to doggedness, less hopeful and tractable in its despair, than any amount of original arrogance and perversity. Sandy saw that he had broken the family circle and rendered himself an alien from it. He said to his mother and Jess that he had better go away and fight his battle for himself, and it would be best that they should not hear the accounts, because these would only cause fresh strife and condemnation. Some day they might see he had not been so far wrong. Sandy watched his opportunity; and one fine harvest-day, when the minister, the servants, and Andro Cornfoot, who had borne "the young minister" on his back many a sunny morning lang-syne, were all abroad engaged in the ingathering of the glebe corn, he kissed his mother and shook hands with Jess, and departed without other leave-taking or Sandy, and bringing Sandy's clothes to his mother's care, while in her drawer up stairs lay the pair of silk stockings which in the pride of her heart she had made Sandy sport when he was the escort of his sister and the darling of the young people at the Woodend parties, far before Birkholm in his mother's estimation. To Jess the minister turned with open arms, saying nothing to admit that he had overlooked and injured her, but with something almost pathetic in his dumb determination to make up by every species of indulgence for the irrevocable past. But with all this courage and kindness, the minister's disappointment sat stiffly on him. To escape from its influence he busied himself in his studies, and became more polemical and dogmatic. He shrank from meeting his brethren of the Presbytery, over whom he had reigned supreme, and to some of whom, with sons of their own, he had allowed himself, in the fulness of his heart, to boast of the career he had carved for his son, and before whom Sandy had humbled him in the dust, — for none of their sons had turned fiddlers, the only vocation to which Mr. Stewart could compare that of a painter. He shrank from his very parishioners, unless in the way of duty as a clergyman, discontinuing largely his share of the old pleasant neighborly visiting. Peace was restored to Clovenford, but the heartache there was acute and incessant. Almost the only event- and it was never spoken of — was the arrival of one or two foreign newspapers, with foreign postmarks, addressed to Mrs. Stewart, in Sandy's handwriting, which proved that Sandy had Every Saturday, managed to go THE MINISTER'S SANDY AND JESS. abroad to follow his studies, possibly as a travelling tutor; but his family knew nothing about him. Mr. Stewart could not have interdicted the newspapers, and he did not throw them into the fire; but he never looked at them, though he alone could have read any part of their contents. To Mrs. Stewart and Jess the newspapers were a dead letter; but the moment the minister had gone to his books, Mrs. Stewart unfolded them, spread them out on her knee, regarded them wistfully, as if their hieroglyphics could tell her something of Sandy; and had they only anticipated modern improvements, and conveyed to her woodcuts, they might have spoken to her in appropriate language of her boy. At last she folded them up, and deposited them carefully where they were all found one day, in the drawer with her best gown, and the silk stockings, as if she waited for the arrival of a scholar at Clovenford, who would bring the key and unlock the mystery occasioned by the confusion of tongues. Sandy went away in the harvest, and towards the close of the next spring Birkholm, who had been in Edinburgh all the winter with his sisters, came back to his own house, and called afterwards at the manse to announce the marriage of his eldest sister to a gallant naval captain, who had been fortunate in obtaining prize money, was on shore only for a short time, and as he was already posted to another ship, and had no time to lose, had so expedited matters, that he wanted Mr. Stewart to tie the knot at once at Birkholm. It is said that one marriage lightly turns a roving Mr. and Mrs. Stewart were altogether propitious, 66 "My dancing days are over, minister," Mrs. Mrs. Stewart said not another word. But the minister was troubled at Jess's reticence, cast about in his mind for a cause or cure, and stumbled on one of his old acts of lavish generosity, and extraordinary misconception of his daughter's taste and of the laws of harmony. He surprised her by the arrival from her mother's merchant's shop in Woodend of a gown of yellow crape, with a pink silk scarf to match. After Jess had overcome the shock at the sight of the articles, and her resolution to find they were not straight with them into the minister's study. for her, she took them up in her arms and went "Well, Jess, what is in the wind now? Have you changed your mind about going to the marriage he demanded, looking up from at Birkholm? Campbell on Miracles, and pretending ignorance and innocence. To the minister's consternation, Jess's tears, kept for special occasions, began suddenly to fall like your presents. I shall wear the one or the other at rain. "Father, do not think that I do not value the kirk whenever the weather will permit, and as long as two threads hang together. But I cannot go to Birkholm: it is not fit that I should go and show off among the fine folk there, when somebody who has as good a right to your favor as I have, and wants it far more, has to live without." "Jess, is it a fit return for my kindness that you should be so bold as question my judgment? I forbid you to speak another word to me on the subject of your brother." The minister dared her with flashing eyes, and ence to burst out to her mother, conquered her so far as to drive her from his pres Mother, my father is cruel to Sandy; we have “He need not try it," answered Jess, shortly. in the mercy of laying burdens on other men's backs? the pure all things are pure,' if Sandy was not as innocent as a bairn,) or that I will flaunt like a butterfly, when, for aught I can tell, my brother Sandy, who was a hundred times more dutiful than I have ever been, may be pining in a garret or perishing in the streets." เ "O whisht, Jess, whisht!" implored Mrs. Stewart. "Why do you bid me whisht,' mother; why do you not interfere?" cried Jess, worked into a noble passion, sweeping backwards and forwards through the confined space of the manse parlor, herself like a mother robbed of her young. 66 Why do you not stand up for Sandy? He is your son, and you liked him, with reason, twice as well as your daughter. I would not suffer my father's tyranny." There could have been no time to write for Sandy, even had the minister and Jess known where he was to be found, and Mrs. Stewart had not asked for her son. No immediate danger had been anticipated by the doctor, or apprehended by the patient and her relations, until within a few hours of her death, and then speech and in part consciousness had failed her. Unless the look of the eyes, which, heavy with their last long slumber, roused themselves to search round the room, once and again, referred to the absence of Sandy, Mrs. Stewart passed away with her love, perhaps like most great love, silent. But when all was over, Jess thought with a breaking heart of the ignorance of him who had most cause to mourn, and of his place filled by others less Jess, Jess, you do not know what you are say-entitled to be there on the day when the wife and ing. I could not rebel against the minister. And do not you misjudge your father: he groans in his sleep; and think how good a man he is. And oh, Jess! you cannot mind, but I can, how he took the candle and held it over Sandy in the cradle. And when your little sister died, and your father at the Glenork preachings, and I sent the nearest elder to meet him to break to him the distress at home, he guessed it before Mr. Allan could get out the words. He was always a sharp man, your father, and he just put up his hand and pled with the messenger, Not Sandy; tell me it is not Sandy.' It was not that he was not fond of his lasses, Jess, you know; but they could not bear his name and uphold his Master's credit as his lad would do." Though Mrs. Stewart did nothing, could do nothing, when Jess came to think of it, sobbing in her own room in the reaction after her recantation, both for Sandy and for Birkholm, from that day's confidence mother and daughter were knit together as they had not been before. In the beginning Jess had been a little too vigorous and energetic for her mild, tender mother; but Mrs. Stewart clung to Jess in the end with mingled fond respect, deep gratitude, and yearning affection. On Sabbath days, when the minister left his wife in the kirk porch to go into the session-room, it was on Jess's arm that Mrs. Stewart now leant for the short distance up the aisle to the minister's bucht, on the right hand of the pulpit. On the few other occasions when she crossed her threshold, while she was able to move about among her flowers, or stroll to the Kames for the spectacle of the setting of the sun, which shone on other lands besides Scotland, she sought to have Jess on the one side of her and the minister on the other. Another peculiarity of Mrs. Stewart's this summer was her struggle against her feebleness, her efforts to convince herself and others that she was gaining strength, the eagerness with which she applied every means for the restoration of her health, new milk, port wine, even to the homely, uncouth superstitions of a stocking from the minister's foot wrapped round her throat at night, and the breath of the cows in the cow-house the first thing of a morning. It was as if something had happened which would not let her die when her time came. It was well for Jess that she was much with her mother during the summer, and that their communion was that of perfect love; for before the summer was ended Mrs. Stewart was attacked by a sudden increase of illness, and after a week's suffering was gone where she might have clear intelligence of Sandy, to which all the knowledge of this world would have been no more than the discordant words of an unknown tongue. mother was borne to her grave beside her baby who had passed from her mother's bosom to the bosom of the second mother of us all, the earth, who, if she had lived, would have been an older woman than Jess; and beside the old divines who had filled the minister's pulpit, and their faithful wives, of centuries back, in the grassy kirkyard within sight of the windows of her old home, where a stormy wind might carry the leaves from her garden and scatter them on the mound. That mound, whether white with May gowans or December snows, would never be out of the minister's and Jess's minds, and near it distance-divided families and former neighbors would still meet and "be glad to have their crack in the kirkyard," and not forget to say softly in her praise what a fine gentlewoman the minister's wife had been, and how the minister, poor man, would miss her. If Adam Spottiswoode had been at Birkholm, Jess might have applied to him in her desperation to learn if he had heard anything of Sandy, and to beg of him to intercede with her father for his son. But Birkholm was absent at the moors, and Jess had respect for her father's affliction, and would not torture him to no end. Therefore Mr. Stewart and Jess bore the brunt of that dark day-the darker that it was in the height of summer, the prime and pride of the year — alone, but for sorrowing neighbors and dependents. When Mr. Stewart returned to the manse after the funeral party was dispersed, and retired to his room, Jess could not intrude on him. It was the room to which he had brought her a bride, and she had died in it. It was her room now while his time of the manse lasted, though she had vacated it humbly during her life. Jess had too much fellow-feeling with her father not to divine that no hand but his own would be suffered to dispose of its mistress's little shawl and cap, which in the hurry of her last illness had been put on the side-table among his books. He would see them there, sitting in the gloaming at his meditations, and half believe that her light foot at her feeblest it was a light onewould be heard again on the threshold, and her fair, faded face, which had been to him as none other but Sandy's, would look in upon him, smiling, while she asked some simple kind question, Why was he sitting without a light? Was he sure he had shifted his feet on coming in from christening the bairn at the Cotton Bog? Was he ready to ask a blessing on the sowens for supper? Jess had her own sorrows, but they were a little lightened when, the long afternoon over, her father re-entered, the sleeves of his coat looking conspicuous in their white cuffs, with which she would grow so familiar that they would seem more than any other details of his The month of May, with its lilac-lily-oak they called it at Clovenford- and hawthorn, was about its close, and the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland was about to conclude for the season its time-honored, pious, benevolent, virulent squabbles. The minister wanted his tea, and tried to speak on indifferent subjects, on the long drought and The minister of Clovenford was not a member the burned-up pasture, but stopped abruptly be- this year, but he took it into his head late one evencause he could not put back the thought, and heing that he would like to be present at a certain deknew that Jess shared it, that Mrs. Stewart not ten bate next night, and, with constitutional rapidity, days ago had been lamenting the drought in that fixed that he would go to Edinburgh next morning room, and had been making her arrangements to by the early coach which passed through Woodend, send out the servants every evening with their take Jess with him for a treat, be present in the galhooks to cut grass at the ditch-sides, and bring back lery of the Assembly, spend what was left of the their aprons full of a fresh, green supper for her night at Jess's Aunt Peggy's, and return by the late coach the next night to Clovenford; "for there will be nobody sitting up for us at home," he put in, with an involuntary touch of pathos, when he found how easy the scheme was. But the minister had not been in such good spirits for a long time, and it was with something of his old animation that he entered into the details, congratulated Jess that she would have an opportunity of seeing the Lord High Commissioner, and graphically detailed the marks by which she might distinguish the leaders of the kirk. beasts. He walked to the window and looked out beyond the flowery garden, where the evening wind soughed sadly in the grass of the kirkyard. Then he turned and said, emphatically, "Our wound is deep, though we need not let it be seen. But, Jess, it is not by a gloomy token like that that she would like us to mind her; not that it is not good in its way, everything is good or changed to good, even parting and death, when they are but a stage to meeting and everlasting life. But, Jess, we must take care Jess was glad that her father should feel able for of her beasts and birds and flowers, that they may the excursion, and soberly pleased with it on her never miss her as we shall do, always (though we own account. She had been in Edinburgh just once troubled the last of her days with our discord). We before, and had seen the Castle, Holyrood, Princes must keep up her habits, that every day may have Street, George Street, and St. Andrew's Square alits trace of her." He went on speaking with un-ready. Two days in Edinburgh were of such rarity usual openness for a strong, reserved man, on the sweet and winning morning light which had lingered with his wife and Jess's mother amidst the dust and clouds of the heat of the day; on her love of animals and plants, quaint books, plaintive old songs, primitive sayings; her walks to the Kames to see the sun set; her reveries looking into the blazing coals on the winter hearth. And Jess knew she was her father's trusted friend, and that he saw in her one who comprehended and shared his life-long loss and sorrow. III. — THE PICTURE. FOR Some time after her mother's death, Jess was thrilled with a nervous expectation that Sandy would "cast up," as she expressed it, in the gloaming or the dawning, any day, to take his part in their mourning. The news of his mother's death would reach him through friends or the announcement in the newspapers. But as months passed, Jess was forced to renounce the expectation, and submit to the obscurity which hung over Sandy. The minister and Jess lived together in strict seclusion, until the sharp edge was worn off their sorrow; and then the minister had grown a quiet, absorbed, gray student, whom Jess could only wile from his household gods—the books for the benefit of his health, by ingenious stratagems and unremitting pains. And Jess was a fine-looking, composed woman, with the eye and the hand of a mother, and the carriage of a duchess. It was summer again at Clovenford, and the whole place and people were pervaded with a grave, | shaded, softened brightness, not wanting in flashes of mirth, relieving what was pensive in domestic life, for both Jess and the minister possessed the composite quality of humor, and not only raised the laugh in others, but were subject themselves to sudden ringing peals of laughter; the wisdom being as old and common as sin and misery, which the wit of Grizel Baillie set in one memorable line, "Werena my heart licht I would dee." and importance that few country-women of her circle attained them more than once in their lives, and then it was on such momentous occasions as the celebration of their marriages in the capital, or the scarcely less serious step of going with bridegrooms, mothers, and matronly friends, to buy their "marriage things" out of metropolitan shops, gloriously combining love and adventure, pleasure and profit. Jess, though far behind in other respects, felt a little elated at the double feat. The minister and Jess were on foot by five o'clock next morning; found even the end of May rather raw on the top of a coach at that early hour; spent the greater part of the day on the road, indefatigably enjoying the scenery, and sheltering themselves under cloak and mantle from pelting showers; alighting and swallowing slices of salt beef from perennial rounds, glassfuls of sherry and tumblerfuls of porter, leisurely, while the coach was changing horses in the inn-yards of country towns; and, after inquisitively scrutinizing and formally addressing fellow-travellers, ending by establishing fast friendships with them before the coach and its burden rolled up the High Street of that Auld Reekie which, whether in ancient or modern guise, is one of the most picturesque of cities. The journey, which occupies so large an amount of old travellers' narratives, safely and creditably performed, the rest of the play remained to be played out. Aunt Peggy received her unexpected visitors with a cordial recollection of summer weeks spent by her and her old maiden servant in country quarters at Clovenford, and attended them to the Assembly, where the minister procured the party's admission. And Jess saw his Grace the Commissioner; was duly impressed by his throne; heard, with all the interest a minister's daughter ought to feel, the question of "teinds" amply discussed; and just as her high head, with its gypsy bonnet, was beginning to nod in a manner the most undignified and unlike Jess, and when she was thinking she could not keep |