It was difficult, whatever your views, to deny agreement to his earnest eyes, and next he was speaking of the oubliette in the corner, before limping towards the bakery with its great oven and the buttery hatch. Then he led you to the site of the oblong refectory, and pointed out the daïs for the lector, and the open fireplace. The brewery, the store rooms, and the treasure chamber, with the holes for the heavy bars still apparent in the slit-like windows, he was disposed to hurry by, as though eager to lead you to his choicest item, which he had reserved with fine instinct to the last. For, outside the walls, might be seen the stone coffin of a disgraced monk, who had been buried, as a warning to the shocked, bovine brethren, with his head against the bakery oven. When you had seen all these wonders, which Michael Stamp contrived because of his great love to make more interesting than I can do, you gave him what small sum your generosity or your avarice suggested, and left him to return to the magpies and the pigeons in the winding stairs and to a contemplation of the old red stones that had become a part of his being. It is to be supposed that Michael Stamp found happiness in those days, for happiness sometimes comes to a man who gives his whole strength and heart to one object. He possessed no other interest in life beyond the Priory, and he devoted his powers to the perfecting of his understanding of its history. His memory seemed unfailing, and he never degenerated into the mechanical gabble of the hardened professional curator. From that abyss, at least, he was saved by his own love and the mercy of the gods. But he had borne many things in his day, and another shadow was to fall upon him before the greatest and most merciful of all shadows fell. One morning, soon after his sixtieth birthday, as he limped with two strangers round the ruins, he was conscious of a lack of clearness in his ideas, and of a certain break in the current of his description. The strangeness of the sensation frightened him, and in a little while he found himself standing with his clients before the Prior's kitchen and unable to recollect what it had been. He stood in misery, conscious that his tale could be picked up a few paces on, but assured that this particular point was nothing but a dreadful blank. Luckily his charges were not especially intelligent or interested, and had noticed nothing. He led them on to the remains of the prison cell, where his memory returned, and he was able to go through the rest of his task, more mechanically than usual, but without an actual stumble. He was feeling strangely sleepy, and he returned to his cottage, where he fell into a heavy doze. But the hour of sunset found him again within the ruins. He stood beneath the lovely single arch, a small, dark, lonely figure in the tawny light, and he strove to face the possibility that his memory was going from him. But he could not do so, for he realised dimly that this would mean the stealing of all love and colour from his life. The ruins were all that he had now, and if his memory failed him, if his pride in their care and in the telling of their story were taken away, there would be nothing left for which to live. He was not an imaginative man, and his religious views were strangely simple and puritanical; but he had grown to fancy that sometimes the old monks returned of an evening to their earthly home. In the shadows of the long summer twilights he had often thought quite seriously that he could detect their dark-robed figures, and it pleased him to fancy that they liked old Michael Stamp because of his fondness for their Priory. This belief was strong upon him now, and he spoke aloud, as he stood in the slowly waning yellow light: 'I don't rightly know if you can hear me,' he said, 'but you know that I'm main fond of your old red stones. I'm small and lame, but I'm not so very old yet. You might put in a word for me, and ask that I may go on remembering things for a while.' He had spoken quite earnestly, and he stood for a little time as though expecting an answer. Then his face crinkled, and he laughed with a sort of whimsical chiding for his own folly. He was wondering what any of the islanders would have said if they had heard his words. But the laughter died with pitiful abruptness, for there was at his heart a real terror that might not be conquered or thrust away. He limped back to his cottage, and no sleep came to him that night until the sunrise had tinged the sea with pink. When he awoke his fear came back to him in a black wave and dulled the golden sunshine. He lay for a little while, striving to go item by item through the account of the ruins that he gave to visitors. But his mind was very dull and heavy. . . . He crept from his bed at last, and, forgetful of breakfast, hobbled out towards the Priory. His face was white and drawn, but there was still the brightness of hope in his serious grey eyes. Surely, with the sight of the red stones and the old ordered round, his memory would return and all be as before? He would believe, he must believe, that this dreadful blankness which had come so suddenly would be swept away. But, an hour later, a woman standing at her cottage door saw Michael Stamp creep by. She thought that he seemed even smaller and more bent than usual, and she wondered that he did not return his customary gravely courteous answer to her greeting; but she had other matters to attend to, and even her keen sight could not detect the dull, hopeless misery in his eyes. Afterwards, when the queer stroke or illness that had come to Michael Stamp was public property, she remembered many details that she had noticed-and even more that she had not-and the triumph of the discoverer was hers in countless conversations. Fate in real life does not always do its work with cleanness. It would perhaps have been better if Michael had died upon the day he knew his fate. But he lived on, his querulous ill-temper in sad contrast to his former gently reserved calm, and for a while he still haunted the ruins, although a younger man had taken his place. He was striving to remember, and he hated his successor with an exceeding bitterness. In those first days he would air his troubles to any who would listen. But after a while this mood passed, and then he shut himself in his cottage and scarcely stirred abroad from day to day. One summer night, thirteen months after the loss of his memory, when for half a year he had kept away from his former charge, Michael Stamp dreamed a strange dream. It should be said that those months had brought about a striking change in his appearance. He had always been thin, but now his flesh was shrunken, and his eyes appeared too large for his face. He had also lost his scrupulous neatness of person, and his white hair was long and tangled. He dreamed that night that he awoke and dressed himself with his old care, and then walked through the moonlight to the Priory. It seemed to him in his dream that his lameness had vanished, and that he walked without his sticks. He The ruins were very stately and silent and aloof in the cold white moonlight. As he saw them in his dream his eyes grew wet and his small wrinkled hands began to shake a little. opened the iron gate with his old key, and locked it carefully behind him. Then he went steadily forward through the outer court and beyond, and as he went he repeated softly the details and the story that he had been used to tell before his memory went. But now he was telling them, he knew, more beautifully and completely than ever in his life before. And the knowledge filled his heart with warmth. He knew that all was very well with him at last. His memory had come back, and with it had come such powers as he had never known. Past the well and the refectory and all the old remembered spots he went, until he returned to where the great single arch swept up into the moonlight. And there he sank down upon the ground, for he was strangely weary. All about him the figures of the old monks were pacing, and he nodded to them in a friendly, grateful fashion. 'You've been very good to me. You heard what I asked,' he said, simply. You knew that it was bitter hard for me not to remember, and so you spoke a word for me. It's all well now.' He smiled very happily, and it seemed to him in his dream that he laid back his tired head against the old red stones and went to sleep. And it was there that they found him in the morning. JOHN BARNETT. OLD DEESIDE: ITS SONGS AND STORIES. OLD residents on Deeside still resent the slighting notice of Tom Moore in his 'Life of Byron'-that 'it is a small, bleak valley, not at all worthy of being associated with the memory of a poet.' And the sweet singer who went into raptures over the Vale of Avoca where the bright waters meet, had gone out of his way to dismiss the Linn of Dee as a small waterfall.' Byron himself, like Mark Twain's cat inexperienced in quartz-mining, 'thought different.' In one of his noblest passages, when world-worn and disillusioned, he revived the boyish memories of his days of innocence : He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue, And clasp the mountain in his mind's embrace. Long have I roamed through lands which are not mine, For George Noel Byron was of half Highland blood: from his mother, the heiress of the Gordons of Gight, he inherited his morbid temperament and fiery sensibilities. Nor was the blood cooled by blending with that of the Byrons. He knew Deeside well, from the tideway to Ballater, for in his boyhood he had been educated at the grammar school of Aberdeen, and had been taken as an invalid to the wells of Pananich. There is a legend that, lame as he was, when his schoolfellows shrank from the feat, he climbed a shaky ladder to rob a sparrow's nest under the eaves of one of the lofty gables on the School hill. But, with the superstition that shadowed him in after-life, he never cared to ride across 'Balgounie's brig's black wa',' the dark arch spanning the deep salmon pool on the Don, for he was the only son of his mother, and there |