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receding roar, then a fresh explosion of wrath, which shook the land's foundations. It seemed to her, as she sat listening, as if it were the earth itself breathing-inhaling, and exhaling,-as

lay at her feet, and saw his features softened, as it were, through the fog. Her thoughts, her feelings, her very senses, were in a strange whirl, and all sorts of dim yearnings peeped forth, only to be hustled out of sight

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and bashfully hidden. She felt his eyes resting upon her tenderly, and with a sweet seriousness which made her glow and shiver in the same moment.

There must have been something sympathetic in the shiver, for he presently got up, and shivered too.

"It is getting dark," he said; "the moon will soon drop out of sight."

She made no answer, and he sauntered uneasily about her for a few minutes, gazing intently at her, as if he were battling with some great resolution. She looked lovely, as she sat there in the moon-lit fog, her eyes kindled with emotion, and her pensive, demure little face animated by a vague expectancy. "Miss Charity,' he began, his voice starting out of the dusk with sudden vehemence; "I have a world of things to say to you. I have

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Before he had time to finish, a trebroke over the reef, spreading with scores of shallow arms over the sand. In an instant she was on her feet and rushed up the beach. But he caught her in his arms, and held her in a tight embrace, while the water gurgled about her ankles.

if she felt its mighty breast heaving. In mendous wave the presence of this gigantic monster, which spoke with the voice of eternity in her ear, whose very gentlest whisper shook her innermost being, she felt herself so infinitely small. She looked half anxiously at the face of the youth who

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RANDOM MEMORIES.

By Robert Louis Stevenson.

ANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are more often agreeably exciting. Misery-or at least misery unrelieved is confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the "dreadful lookingfor" of departure; when the old life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun; and to the pain of an imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious preexistence. The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semisuburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing field—what a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems to him, but from without. I was proud and glad to go to school; had I been let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but there was around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: "Poor little boy, he is going away-unkind little boy, he is going to leave us;" so the unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach. And at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a place where it seems

to me, looking back, it must be always autumn and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I saw-the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon the hill, the woody hill-side garden-a look of such a piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with consolations-we two were alone in all that was visible of the London Road: two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow-and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment, watching the effect, it seemed, with motherly eyes. Long ago has that small heart been quieted, that small body (then rigid and cold) buried in the end of a town garden, perhaps with some attendant children. She will never console another trembler on the brink of life: poor little mouse, bringing strength to the young elephant: poor little thing of a year or two ministering to the creature of near upon a century.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the story of my own weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It was judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway, some change of scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was visiting the harbor lights of Scotland; and it was decided he should take me along with him around

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a portion of the shores of Fife: my first professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of man, without the help of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and Tay. It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the rest, from the windows of my father's house) dying away into the distance and the easterly haar with one smoky sea-side town beyond another, or in winter printing on the gray heaven some glittering hill tops. It has no beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-salted, wind-vexed promontory; trees very rare, except (as common on the east coast) along the dens of rivers; the fields well cultivated, I understand, but not lovely to the eye. It is of the coast I speak the interior may be the garden of Eden. History broods over that part of the world like the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an old and settled race. Of these little towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit of harbor, its old weather-beaten church or public building, its flavor of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend, quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled;" Burntisland where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between tide-marks, and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland dialect; Kinghorn, where Alexander "brak's neckbane" and left Scotland to the English wars; Kirkaldy, where the witches once prevailed extremely and sunk tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea; Dysart, famous-well famous at least to me for the Dutch ships that lay in its harbor, painted like toys and with pots of flowers and cages of song-birds in the cabin windows, and for one partic

ular Dutch skipper who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop, smoking a long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounce Weems) with its bat-haunted caves, where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed a night of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place, sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr. Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers from Meerut clattered and cried "Deen Deen" along the streets of the imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven, Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe. So on, the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the reader will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monance, and Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail where Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to the heel of the land, to Fifeness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted elders and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but the breach or the quiescence of the deep— the Carr Rock beacon rising close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef springing up on the one hand, and the star of the May Island on the other, and further off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland of St. Abb's. And but a little way round the corner of the land, imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem of the province and the light of mediæval Scotland, St. Andrew's, where the great Cardinal Beaton held garrison against the world, and the second of the name and title perished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives of true-blue Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the current voice of the professor is not hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of in

spection began, early on a bleak easterly morning. There was a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I recollect, and my father and the man of the harbor light must sometimes raise their voices to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance, that I always imagine St. Andrew's to be an ineffectual seat of learning, and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its drowsy class-rooms and confound the utterance of the professor, until teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull beats on the windows and the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages of the open lecture. But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrew's in general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang; who has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with his incommunicable humor, and long ago in one of his best poems, with grace, and local truth and a note of unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows all about the romance, I say, and the educational advantages, but I doubt if he had turned his attention to the harbor lights; and it may be news even to him, that in the year 1863, their case was pitiable. Hanging about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I make no doubt) in my pocket, I looked for the first time upon that tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often reenacted on a more important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my grandfather writing: "It is the most painful thing that can occur to me to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the keepers, and when I come to the Light House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet them with approbation and welcome their Family, it is distressing when one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanor." This painful obligation has been hereditary in my race. I have myself, on a perfectly amateur and unauthorized inspection of Turnberry Point, bent my brows upon the keeper on the question of storm-panes; and felt a keen pang of self-reproach, when we went down stairs again and I found he was making a coffin for his infant child; and then regained my equanimity with the thought that I had done the man a service, and when the

proper inspector came, he would be readier with his panes. The human race is perhaps credited with more duplicity than it deserves. The visitation of a light-house at least is a business of the most transparent nature. As soon as the boat grates on the shore, and the keepers step forward in their uniformed coats, the very slouch of the fellows' shoulders tells their story and the engineer may begin at once to assume his "angry countenance." angry countenance." Certainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded; 1; and if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to match-the reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the storehouse. If a light is not rather more than middling good, it will be radically bad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to be unattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrew's was only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no uniform coat, he was (I believe) a plumber by his trade and stood (in the medieval phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but he had a painful interview for all that, and perspired extremely.

From St. Andrew's, we drove over Magus Muir. My father had announced we were "to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's Dance of Death; but it was only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that drive. It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do I remember any single trait. The fact has not been supposed to encroach on the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred years ago; a desert place, quite uninclosed; in the midst, the Primate's carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose reined in pursuit, Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the live bum-bee that

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