KIDNAPPED

This is no furniture for the scholar’s library, but a book for the winter evening schoolroom when the tasks are over and the hour for bed draws near; and honest Alan, who was a grim old fireeater in his day, has in this new avatar no more desperate purpose than to steal some young gentleman’s attention from his Ovid, carry him awhile into the Highlands and the last century, and pack him to bed with some engaging images to mingle with his dreams.As for you, my dear Charles, I do not even ask you to like this tale. But perhaps when he is older, your son will, he then be pleased to find his father’s name on the flyleaf; and in the meanwhile it pleases me to set it there, in memory of many days that were happy and some (now perhaps as pleasant to remember) that were sad. If it is strange for me to look back from a distance both in time and space on these bygone you who tread adventures of our youth, it must be stranger for the door of the old the same streets-who tomorrow may Speculative, where we begin to rank with Scott and Robert Emmet and the beloved and inglorious Macbean-or may pass the corner of the close where that great society, the L. J. R., held its meetings and drank its beer, sitting in the seats of Burns and his companions. I think I see you, moving there by plain daylight, beholding with your natural eyes those places that have now become for your companion a part of the scenery of dreams. How, in the intervals of present business, the past must echo in your memory! Let it not echo often without some kind thoughts of your friend,

SKERRYVORE,

BOURNEMOUTH.