cover the remarkable capacity of his lady love, and to think himself lucky. He was lucky. He wanted development. This girl could

develop him, if anybody could. He was just in the poetic and reckless stage, when a brilliant boy wants a mistress.

Louisa was capable of mastery.

Down in those same cellars they found for a long time very little indeed. But in a dingy corner, lighted only through a loophole, they suddenly discovered a pile of bottles. Louisa took one of them from the bin, and examined its label.

"Don't you wish you could read?" she said to Silvester.

"Not to read wine-labels," he replied.

"Ah, that's all very fine; but wine-labels are of use. Take a bottle of this up for your father to look at. He will be cured of his heresy. You know, Silvester, I don't mean to marry a man who can't read."

"How cruel!" he said. "As if a girl

married a man in order that he should read to

her! Most girls would rather be kissed than read to."

Louisa's reply is unrecorded.

When the three parties met on the beach, where Donald was arranging the dead panther for transit, each had a discovery.

"We have found a mysterious manuscript," says the Squire, Musical Willie being his partner in the discovery.

"So have we," said the Doctor, who had been gallantly escorting Miss Silvia. "But as it is too late to think of manuscripts now, let us compare them to-morrow."

"Ah," said Louisa, showing her bottle of Lachrimae Christi, which she had been carefully hiding, "you won't leave these till to-morrow, surely?"

The Doctor looked at the dusty flask.

66

Manuscripts can wait; but wines can't,

Donald.

at once.

bottles."

We'll get all that stuff into the boat
There may be a lyric in one of those

The wine reached Silchester that day, and was tested. The manuscripts, by agreement, were postponed.

CHAPTER XX.

THE STORIES TOLD OVER LACHRIMAE CHRISTI.

"Ubi lacrimat Zeus, Nestoris ebibat annos."

HEY were very dusty old bottles that had

THE

been found in the cellars of Seamew Grange. They were of a quaint old shape. The man who had bottled the wondrous wine would have been a centenarian at least if he had lived till that wine was drunken. As the Squire held it up in the light, the marvellous fluid, purple and amber mixed, seemed to scintillate with pleasure at escaping from its long imprisonment. The bright specks within it seemed to laugh. The idea occurred to the Squire, who filled a glass for Louisa, saying,

VOL. I.

16

"Why should not a good old aristocratic wine be delighted to kiss the lips of a lady?"

"I wonder," said the Doctor, "whence that wine came, and why nobody has yet drunken it. To me it seems miraculous. To find such a fluid in a semi-barbarous island is surely a thing without parallel in any record later than the Odyssey or the stories of Scheherazade. hope the manuscripts we have to read will throw some light on it."

I

Musical Willie had spent some hours in making such sense as he could of the manuscript which he and the Squire had discovered. It was dreadfully dusty and grimy, and the hole of the dagger-thrust had made many passages illegible; but Willie Nairn, a professed archæologist, skilfully restored it, and now he read it to his audience with as much delight as if he had been the original author, and with obvious belief in the wild story which it told.

The story had no title. It began abruptly,