Perthshire in bygone days

THE BELSHES OF INVEEMAT. 79
to Mr. Belshes ; but, gentleman as he was, he refused it.
But suppose that he had not, would it be " babyism " to
demand an enactment, investing that family's interest in the
lease, with permanence as inviolable as that with which
their money was invested in the land? It is a manifest
injustice to encourage the laying out of money by a lease-
holder, Jand, on an emergency such as I have named, to
deny his heirs the right of sub-letting. The proprietor
ought to have the right of pre-emption, but nothing more.
He has no more title, in equity, to the money so laid out,
than he has to what is in the tenant's strong box; and if it
resolves itself into a rise of rent, every penny of that rise
belongs to the tenant's representatives until the currency of
the lease is exhausted. If Mr. Belshes had acted up to the
terms of the repudiated lease, he would have said, " Your
friend had no right to die till his son was of age :" and to
make a lease that no honest man can act upon is the
poisoned gruel that drives the farmer into the nursery.
During the earlier years of the century people had to
exercise great patience in awaiting the arrival of news, how-
ever important they might be. The result of the great fight
at Waterloo was not known in Strathearn until a whole
week had transpired. It was well known that Wellington
and Napoleon were getting ominously contiguous, and that
something decisive of the fate of Great Britain and France
was about to happen. If the news came slowly, they were
not allowed to come quietly, for each mail guard and rural
letter carrier was armed with a tin trumpet, two feet long,
through which he heralded, with terrific snorts, the fact
that he was on his way. Mr. A. H. M. Belshes was in the
habit, throughout his whole life, of prowling about his
grounds, and if any trespasser came in his way, he did not
scruple to read him a lecture on the law of meum and tumn.
On the Sunday after Waterloo he was taking a quiet morn-
ing turn round the outside of his grounds, when the note of
the coming postman came swelling along the breeze.
Mr. Belshes venerated the institutions of his country, and
took a deep interest in its prosperity : but he considered
this a decided casus belli; and, intercepting the noisy func-
tionary, he said authoritatively, "What are you blowing
about? — disturbing people on Sunday morning with your
abominable noise ! Go along quietly." The small official,
although backed by all the authority of St. Martin's-le-
Grand, rather quailed before the lofty proprietario of