"Tell me, child," he continued, "that I may put a stop to it at once." He was rising to ring the bell, that he might give the orders consequent on the information he expected: he would have asked Mammon to dinner in black clothes and a white tie, but on Superstition in the loveliest garb would have loosed all the dogs of Glashruach, to hunt her from the property.

Her next words, however, arrested him, and just as she ended, the butler came in with fresh toast.
"They say," said Ginevra, anxious to avoid the forbidden Scotch, therefore stumbling sadly in her utterance, "there's a broonie--brownie--at the Mains, who dis a'-- does all the work." "What is the meaning of this, Joseph ?" said Mr.Galbraith, turning from her to the butler, with the air of rebuke, which was almost habitual to him, a good deal heightened.
"The meanin' o' what, sir ?" returned Joseph, nowise abashed, for to him his master was not the greatest man in the world, or even in the highlands.

"He's no a Galbraith," he used to say, when more than commonly provoked with him.
"I ask you, Joseph," answered the laird, "what this--this outbreak of superstition imports?
You must be aware that nothing in the world could annoy me more than that Miss Galbraith should learn folly in her father's house.

That staid servants, such as I had supposed mine to be, should use their tongues as if their heads had no more in them than so many bells hung in a steeple, is to me a mortifying reflection." "Tongues as weel's clappers was made to wag, sir; an, wag they wull, sir, sae lang's the tow (string) hings oot at baith lugs," answered Joseph.

The forms of speech he employed were not unfrequently obscure to his master, and in that obscurity lay more of Joseph's impunity than he knew.