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ended effusively with "Your ever-devoted Belial." It is quite possible that these children thought and hoped they were doing something desperately wicked, only they lacked a historian to chronicle their guilt. It is equally certain that Lag's drunken troopers, if they ever did divert themselves in the unbecoming manner ascribed to them, might have been more profitably, and, it would seem, more agreeably, employed. But, of one thing, at least, we may feel tolerably confident. The pastime would have found scant favor in the eyes of Claverhouse, who was a man of little imagination, of stern discipline, and of fastidiously decorous habits. Why, even Wandering Willie does him this much justice, when he describes him as alone amid the lost souls, isolated in his contemptuous pride from their feasts and dreadful merriment: "And there sat Claverhouse, as beautiful as when he lived, with his long, dark, curled locks streaming down over his laced buff-coat, and his left hand always on his right spule-blade, to hide the wound that the silver bullet had made. He sat apart from them all, and looked at them with a melancholy, haughty countenance." If history