never attempted to associate with him. Sometimes a stray caller
appeared, prompted by curiosity, which Mrs. Campbell generally found
ingenious reasons for leaving ungratified, and Lord Cairnforth's
excessive shyness and dislike to appear before strangers did the rest.
It is astonishing how little the world cares to cultivate those out of
whom it can get nothing; and the small establishment at Cairnforth
Castle, with its almost invisible head, soon ceased to be an object of
interest to any body--at least to any body in that sphere of life
where the earl would otherwise have moved.

Among his own tenantry, the small farmers along the shores of the two
lochs which bounded the peninsula, his long minority and mysterious
affliction made him personally almost unknown. They used to come twice
a year, at WhitSunday and Martinmas, to pay their rents to Mr. Menteith;
to inquire for my lord's health, and to drink in abundance of whisky;
but the earl himself they never saw, and their feelings toward him were
a mixture of reverence and awe.

It was different with the earl's immediate neighbors, the humble
inhabitants of the clachan. These, during the last nine years, had
gradually grown familiar, first with the little childish form, carried
about tenderly in Malcolm's arms, and then with the muffled figure,
scarcely less of a child to look at, which Malcolm, and sometimes Miss
Cardross, drove about in a pony-chaise. At the kirk especially, though
he was always carefully conveyed in first, and borne out last of all the
congregation, his face--his sweet, kind, beautiful face was known to
them all, and the children were always taught to doff their bonnets or
pull their forelocks to the earl.

Beyond that, nobody knew any thing about him. His large property,