On the day before his departure from the house of his learned relative, Rob Roy, who had pondered deeply how he might requite his cousin's kindness, took Dr.Gregory aside, and addressed him to this purport:--"My dear kinsman, I have been thinking what I could do to show my sense of your hospitality.

Now, here you have a fine spirited boy of a son, whom you are ruining by cramming him with your useless book-learning, and I am determined, by way of manifesting my great good-will to you and yours, to take him with me and make a man of him." The learned Professor was utterly overwhelmed when his warlike kinsman announced his kind purpose in language which implied no doubt of its being a proposal which, would be, and ought to be, accepted with the utmost gratitude.

The task of apology or explanation was of a most delicate description; and there might have been considerable danger in suffering Rob Roy to perceive that the promotion with which he threatened the son was, in the father's eyes, the ready road to the gallows.

Indeed, every excuse which he could at first think of--such as regret for putting his friend to trouble with a youth who had been educated in the Lowlands, and so on--only strengthened the chieftain's inclination to patronise his young kinsman, as he supposed they arose entirely from the modesty of the father.

He would for a long time take no apology, and even spoke of carrying off the youth by a certain degree of kindly violence, whether his father consented, or not.