of good stories, a good reader, mimic, and actor as well.

One afternoon we had a call from a quaint old Scotch dame, in a queer
dress, sunbonnet, and spectacles, who introduced herself as the wife
of Sandy Maclachlan, a sheep-farmer who lived about twenty-five miles
away. It wasn't right, she said, that such near neighbours should not
know one another, so she had ridden those few leagues to find out what
we were like. Established at the tea-table, she poured out a torrent
of talk in broadest Scotch, in her high-pitched cracked old-woman's
voice, and gave us an intimate domestic history of all the British
residents of the district. It was all about what delightful people
they were, and how even their little weaknesses--their love of the
bottle, their meannesses, their greed and low cunning--only served to
make them more charming. Never was there such a funny old dame or one
more given to gossip and scandal-mongering! Then she took herself off,
and presently we children, still under her spell, stole out to watch
her departure from the gate. But she was not there--she had vanished
unaccountably; and by and by what was our astonishment and disgust to
hear that the old Scotch body was none other than our own Mr. Trigg!
That our needle-sharp eyes, concentrated for an hour on her face, had
failed to detect the master who was so painfully familiar to us seemed
like a miracle.

Mr. Trigg confessed that play-acting was one of the things he had done
before quitting his country; but it was only one of a dozen or twenty
vocations which he had taken up at various times, only to drop them
again as soon as he made the discovery that they one and all entailed
months and even years of hard work if he was ever to fulfil his
ambitious desire of doing and being something great in the world. As a
reader he certainly was great, and every evening, when the evenings