Plantations?"

"Stow that, Quentin!" cried my uncle, with an oath and his eye on me. "What Plantations are you blethering about? And where have I been? Ask me rather where have I not been. It makes me dizzy even to think of it: with rotten Jesuits and Pagan gentlemen; with France and Spain, and with filthy Lascars, lying Greeks, Eboe slaves, stinking niggers, and slit-eyed Chinese! Oh! I tell you I've seen things in twenty years. And places, too: this Scotland, with its infernal rain and its grey fields and its rags, looks like a nightmare to me yet. You may be sure I'll be out of it pretty fast again."

"Poor Scotland!" said father ambiguously.

There must be people in the world who are oddly affected by the names of places, peoples, things that have never come within their own experience. Till this day the name of Barbadoes influences me like a story of adventure; and when my Uncle Andrew—lank, bearded, drenched with storm, stood in our parlour glibly hinting at illimitable travel, I lost my anger with the tipsy wretch and felt a curious glow go through my being.

CHAPTER IV

I COME UPON THE RED SHOES

Uncle Andrew settled for the remainder of his time into our domestic world at Hazel Den as if his place had been kept warm for him since ever he went away. For the remainder of his time, I say, because he was to be in the clods of Mearns kirkyard before the hips and haws were off the hedges; and I think I someway saw his doom in his ghastly countenance the first morning he sat at our breakfast table, contrite over his folly of the night before, as you could see, but carrying off the situation with worldly sang froid, and even showing signs of some affection for my father.

His character may be put in two words—he was a lovable rogue; his tipsy bitterness to the goodman his brother may be explained almost as briefly: he had had a notion of Katrine Oliver, and had courted her before ever she met my father, and he had lost her affection through his own folly. Judging from what I would have felt myself in the like circumstances, his bitterest punishment for a life ill spent must have been to see Katrine Oliver's pitying kindness to him now, and the sight of that douce and loving couple finding their happiness in each other must have been a constant sermon to him upon repentance.

Yet, to tell the truth, I fear my Uncle Andrew was not constituted for repentance or remorse. He had slain a man honestly once, and had suffered the Plantations, but beyond that (and even that included, as he must ever insist) he had been guilty of no mean act in all his roving career. Follies—vices—extremes—ay, a thousand of them; but for most his conscience never pricked him. On the contrary, he would narrate with gusto the manifold jeopardies his own follies brought him into; his wan face, nigh the colour of a shroud, would flush, and his eyes dance humorously as he shocked the table when we sat at meals, our spoons suspended in the agitation created by his wonderful histories.

Kept to a moderation with the bottle, and with the constant influence of my mother, who used to feed the rogue on vegetables and, unknown to him, load his broth with simples as a cure for his craving, Uncle Andrew was, all things considered, an acquisition to Hazel Den House. Speaking for myself, he brought the element of the unusual and the unexpected to a place where routine had made me sick of my own society; and though the man in his sober senses knew he was dying on his feet, he was the cheeriest person of our company sequestered so remote in the moors. It was a lesson in resignation to see yon merry eyes loweing like lamps over his tombstone cheeks, and hear him crack a joke in the flushed and heaving interludes of his cough.

It was to me he ever directed the most sensational of his extraordinary memorials. My father did not like it; I saw it in his eye. It was apparent to me that a remonstrance often hung on the tip of his tongue. He would invent ridiculous and unnecessary tasks to keep me out of reach of that alluring raconteur, and nobody saw it plainer than Uncle Andrew, who but laughed with the mischievousness of a boy.

Well, the long and short of it was just what Quentin Greig feared—the Spoiled Horn finally smit with a hunger for the road of the Greigs. For three hundred years—we could go no further back, because of a bend sinister—nine out of ten of that family had travelled that road, that leads so often to a kistful of sailor's shells and a death with boots on. It was a fate in the blood, like the black hair of us, the mole on the temple, and the trick of irony. It was that ailment my father had feared for me; it was that kept the household silent upon missing brothers (they were dead, my uncle told me, in Trincomalee, and in Jamaica, and a yard in the Borough of London); it was that inspired the notion of a lawyer's life for Paul Greig.

Just when I was in the deepmost confidence of Uncle Andrew, who was by then confined to his bed and suffering the treatment of Doctor Clews, his stories stopped abruptly and he began to lament the wastry of his life. If the thing had been better acted I might have been impressed, for our follies never look just like what they are till we are finally on the broad of our backs and the Fell Sergeant's step is at the door. But it was not well acted; and when the wicked Uncle Andrew groaned over the very ploys he had a week ago exulted in, I recognised some of my mother's commonest sentiments in his sideways sermon. She had got her quondam Andy, for lang syne's sake, to help her keep her son at home; and he was doing his best, poor man, but a trifle late in the day.

"Uncle Andrew," said I, never heeding his homily, "tell me what came of the pock-marked tobacco planter when you and the negro lay in the swamp for him?"

He groaned hopelessly.

"A rotten tale, Paul, my lad," said he, never looking me in the face; "I rue the day I was mixed up in that affair."

"But it was a good story so far as it went, no further gone than Wednesday last," I protested.

He laughed at that, and for half an hour he put off the new man of my mother's bidding, and we were on the old naughty footing again. He concluded by bequeathing to me for the twentieth time the brass-bound chest, and its contents that we had never seen nor could guess the nature of. But now for the first time he let me know what I might expect there.

"It's not what Quentin might consider much," said he, "for there's not a guelder of money in it, no, nor so little as a groat, for as the world's divided ye can't have both the money and the dance, and I was aye the fellow for the dance. There's scarcely anything in it, Paul, but the trash—ahem!—that is the very fitting reward of a life like mine."

"And still and on, uncle," said I, "it is a very good tale about the pock-marked man."

"Ah! You're there, Greig!" cried the rogue, laughing till his hoast came to nigh choke him. "Well, the kist's yours, anyway, such as it is; and there's but one thing in it—to be strict, a pair—that I set any store by as worth leaving to my nephew."

"It ought to be spurs," said I, "to drive me out of this lamentable countryside and to where a fellow might be doing something worth while."

"Eh!" he cried, "you're no' so far off it, for it's a pair of shoes."

"A pair of shoes!" I repeated, half inclined to think that Uncle Andrew was doited at last.

"A pair of shoes, and perhaps in some need of the cobbler, for I have worn them a good deal since I got them in Madras. They were not new when I got them, but by the look of them they're not a day older now. They have got me out of some unco' plights in different parts of the world, for all that the man who sold them to me at a bonny penny called them the Shoes of Sorrow; and so far as I ken, the