or three engagements which he had made for the week.
Then, having ordered his servant to pack a traveling bag,
he went to bed, more excited than the affair perhaps warranted.

The next day, at five o'clock, James Starr jumped out of bed,
dressed himself warmly, for a cold rain was falling, and left his
house in the Canongate, to go to Granton Pier to catch the steamer,
which in three hours would take him up the Forth as far as Stirling.

For the first time in his life, perhaps, in passing along the Canongate,
he did NOT TURN TO LOOK AT HOLYROOD, the palace of the former
sovereigns of Scotland. He did not notice the sentinels who stood
before its gateways, dressed in the uniform of their Highland regiment,
tartan kilt, plaid and sporran complete. His whole thought was to reach
Callander where Harry Ford was supposedly awaiting him.

The better to understand this narrative, it will be as well to hear
a few words on the origin of coal. During the geological epoch,
when the terrestrial spheroid was still in course of formation,
a thick atmosphere surrounded it, saturated with watery vapors,
and copiously impregnated with carbonic acid. The vapors gradually
condensed in diluvial rains, which fell as if they had leapt
from the necks of thousands of millions of seltzer water bottles.
This liquid, loaded with carbonic acid, rushed in torrents over
a deep soft soil, subject to sudden or slow alterations of

form, and maintained in its semi-fluid state as much by the heat
of the sun as by the fires of the interior mass. The internal
heat had not as yet been collected in the center of the globe.
The terrestrial crust, thin and incompletely hardened, allowed it