6

thatched inn, with its apparatus for shooting and fishing suspended from the roof, to a hero's home 'in Ithaca.' They wished in their teens for an asylum from the levity and dissipation of the age;' they wept abundantly and believed their hearts broken at girlish partings; they were affected and absurd. But, on the other hand, in their own cases, none distinguished more clearly between the real and the imaginary; they mixed shrewd penetration and lively humour with their wildest flights, while they propagated sensible, philosophic, peaceful, pious precepts, (compare Fanny Burney's earlier letters with Fanny Burney's later novels.) And how refreshing it is to find them rising at five o'clock in the morning to have their prayers, their 'little dress, little Odyssey, and little breakfast,' and yet not interfere with the rest of their duties; to hear of Mary Macdonnel having her book stitched full of the letters of her dear correspondents whom she might never see again after they had been school girls together till their heads were grey and their hearts heavy; not 'mighty genteel letters on glossy paper,' not with 'beastly commercial flourishes,' but hearty, sagacious effusions, to be perused with amusement and profit by the hearth on many a stormy, snowy day in the glen. What correspondents such a consciousness of the estimation in which they were held, and the duration of their reign produced! Indeed, indeed, this was more valuable intercourse than that of mere vanity, idleness, and scandal.

Yes, Mary Aldour was a fine, promising creature, whether or not her summer fulfilled the hopes of her spring. The result was pending, whether the bloom of her mind and heart would fade and fall away, or whether it would ripen into autumn fruit. Whether her disposition would wax hard and coarse, or whether grace would be given it to soften and sweeten its harshness into the full nature of a virtuous woman— a woman that feared the Lord, a daughter that excelled them all.

Mary's person was very prepossessing and rather peculiar, but, remember, by no means faultless. She was not so big or stately as some even of her young countrywomen, but she had the elegance of Flora Macdonald, who had spent but a winter on the mainland of Inverness-shire-the elegance of a fine figure, slender, but firm as one of her birch-trees, of great health of body and mind—self-reliant, enduring, elastic —each limb and muscle, faculty and trait, with their notable and unapproachable ease and activity, without restlessness or rashness. She had the flaxen hair and rose-blush complexion which in many girls create an effect insipid as whey, phlegmatic as the general countenance of a doll. But there was fire in Mary's deep blue eyes with their clear brown brows and lashes, play in her irregular features tinted so brightly, and sense and acumen in her full forehead. No one ever imagined a doll like Mary-not even a Frankenstein could have supplied it with so much living soul; no one regretted the 'lint white locks' drawn off the fore

head, and fixed in long pyramids composed of piles of curls combed and linked up together (that was the era of high heads, when the Miss Cumberlands were hissed out of the theatre on account of the length of their erect feathers, according to Mrs. Thrale), erected on Mary's top, somewhat flattened by her hat-no one wanted them black as night to lend additional force and vigour to the intellectual, tolerably determined physiognomy, any more than they would have proposed the white throat, round which so near an approach to a man's neckerchief was knotted accurately, to be tanned brown, in order to rob it of its tame fairness and softness.

Mary walked up Glen Aldour with a springy step. It was one of the mornings when she was very glad that she was at home again, in spite of the youthful Clarissa Harlowe and Harriet Byron friendships, and she knew that many people were equally glad, and that she was particularly wanted in a score of places. Mary was in the greater request, that her eldest brother was at present at college in Aberdeen; young Aldour, though younger than Mary, was of course a person of first-rate consequence in the glen. Then her sisters next in age, Flora and Catherine, were also at school, and there were no individuals of the family to divide her charge but the twelve year old lad Malcolm, lame Niel, and sickly Annie.

Thus Mary endured the whole plague of popularity, and she maintained very frequently that it worried and distracted her, and that when she only felt a rational, friendly Macdonnel feeling to all the families

in the glen, it was trying to find numbers of them depending upon her and expecting a great deal from her. Why it frittered away her heart and exhausted her mind, but Mary's supplies rose to the demand, and she was scarcely ever known to disappoint an applicant. There was she hurrying along, scarcely picking her way through the numerous little waters that leapt over the stones into the loch; not avoiding the troublesome flies that hovered about its margin; not fishing out a water-lily; not examining the hills flecked with brown and green and in broad sunshine or shade, to see whether the sheep had mounted to such heights as indicated fine weather; not even quoting Ossian as a cloud floated by ; but plodding on in the Sabbathlike stillness of the glen, quite busy and cheerful to Mary, telling off in her mind a list of persons whom she was to visit before she returned to the house to dinner.

Mr. Cormac Macgregor, an ally of the Macdonnels, who had grown old in the great world without attaining anything but the reputation of a scholar and gentleman, and worn North again to close his eyes in Aldour-a fine polished gentleman who paid Mary French-founded compliments; who would have cried Cruel to a fair female! oh, fie! fie! fie! pitiful, piti. ful,' but who would not have hesitated to be fractious to that fair female when need required, and to reckon himself entitled to the freshest eggs of her hen Selma, and bannocks of the fair's baking, and the first specimen of her bramble jam.

The old ladies of the Cleugh, who were not at all courtly, but neither were they crabbed, yet they were so well satisfied when she examined the threads on their wheels, and tasted their cakes, and told them the last gossip of the loch, bothies, and House of Aldour.

Mrs. Macdonnel of the Schoolhouse, who was in her own estimation and in Mary's as much a lady as any of them, and who must never be slighted or forgotten because these Robertsons of Croclune, and even the Maclaughlans, Dunglas's factor's familyquite like their upstart, underbred ways-undervalued her but Mrs. Macdonnel had too much good sense and good temper to do anything but laugh at them. Mary's moome amongst the shepherds' wives, the house where there were solemn preparations for the lykewake, the dwelling which rejoiced over the newborn baby, where orders for sheets and caudles and the luxury of white bread were looked for and welcomed.

As Mary passed along in her youth and usefulness and gladsome popularity, almost as much prized as Lady Margaret Macdonald before whom the wild clansmen ran to pick up the stones lest her horse should stumble, sunny and hardy as the sky above and the air around her, she crossed the opening into another glen and saluted a gentleman with a fishingrod who came up its narrow horse track.

Glen Aldour was a flowery sylvan glen, with meadows by the loch, and the stream and its hills

C