bers of the family grew up in Croclune as audacious and unbridled as Flora, and Flora still struggled for precedence among them, and dwelt in sufferance under her father's roof, with the reproach of her early imprudence and rebellion clinging to her; though to do her father and her family justice, they stood too much in dread of Flora's imperiousness and impetuosity to taunt her with her folly. And so Flora grew sharp-featured and thin-voiced, and took to domineering over her companions; and being very prudish when it did not interfere with her worldliness, grew a gossip, and progressed into one of the most dangerous and vindictive of busybodies and mischiefmakers in the Country.

Mary Aldour had no esteem for any of the Robertsons; she struggled with an aversion to the Captain, but it is to be feared she kept up a regular feud with Flora. Mary was tempted to despise her for her youthful, headstrong passion. She would not believe that a girl so selfish as Flora had been misled by her feelings or by anything finer than vanity and violence of fancy and temper. She did not credit that aught but pride occasioned Flora's tenacious adherence to the expectation of Lieutenant Maclean's orders home. Mary did not believe that Flora still cherished affection for the empty-headed boyish acquaintance of a few weeks. In Mary's eyes Flora's marriage had been sheer levity and wickedness; and Flora measured exactly Mary Aldour's estimation of her, and through the convential civilities which she found it convenient to

pay to the standing and sway of Aldour in the Country, she returned scorn for scorn.

There was young Dunglas, by far the most attractive magnet to the Celias in search of husbands, and, after Pitfadden, the biggest laird in prospective in the immediate neighbourhood. Besides, young Dunglas was a very handsome lad, with the crisp yellow hair and bright though dark-freckled complexion said to indicate some of the purest blood of Scandinavia;' yet poor Prince Charlie possessed the attractions to perfection. Old Dunglas, his father, was very infirm, and young Dunglas would not be long of coming to his kingdom, his subjects, his glen, and great house— and black cattle, and sheep, and roe deer, and red deer, and clouds of moor-fowl. In the meantime, as he was an only child and motherless, the young Laird led a very isolated, dull life among his primitive retainers and caressing old servants, and was glad enough to ride along and have a romp with the single gay girl left growing up at Croclune without harm intended. He could pay for his diversion by buying a lame horse from the Captain, and lending a couple of his dogs to Finlay. But the Country already coupled his name with Nancy Robertson's. By good or bad luck his father led too retired a life, and was too full of his own complaints, poor man, to learn the disparaging association.

Mary Aldour was sorry for young Dunglas, and tried to save him from any entanglement with the Robertsons, and that largely from pure disinterest

edness. To be sure, even Mary considered Dunglas a very agreeable beau, (forgive her, dear reader; every unmarried man was classed as a beau-good, bad, or indifferent-then,) he was so good-looking and good-natured-frank, kindly, brave—that it seemed he could afford a tolerable stock of hotheadedness when once irritated, and an exaggerated sense of his own importance without lessening general and individual regard. Do you remember young Col?' 'He is a noble animal; he is a farmer, a sailor, a hunter, a fisher. He is hospitable, and he has an intrepidity of talk whether he understands the subject or not.' And young Col had the additional recommendation that he could run down a greyhound. And he was made a hero, and his tragic fate was lamented as far as Lichfield, and he had the honour of being apostrophized in the 'Gentleman's Magazine.' Dunglas had all the fascination of young Col, and, in addition, he had gentler attractions. Yes, Mary liked John Dunglas, and thought it would be a thousand pities if he fell a victim to the Robertsons.

It might have just crossed Mary's imagination that John Dunglas, her neighbour and equal, might seek a nearer intimacy and a life-long connexion with herself. Aldour and Dunglas had gone together in wedlock ere now, and she might be persuaded to think of the matter seriously, and might find it not an inadmissible change of state, and a tolerable prospect for the future; that is, when they were both a great deal older, and the boys were established, and Flora,

and Katie had returned from school in Inverluig, and perhaps little Annie had become stronger; then it might be advantageous to the pair, and a rational scheme for their mutual happiness and prosperity to old age.

So wise was Mary, so cool, so cautious. Indeed, some of her notions on marriage would have astonished the present generations in their teens. She discoursed upon it in her letters quite as an advanced stage of probation. She was rather disposed to negative it in her own case, and if she did enter the arena and wear the yoke, it would be very warily, with very modest expectations of anything but selfrestraint, mutual concessions, and mutual forbearance; this in the midst of, and because of her heroic romances of Ossian and Homer. But these were not the theories of Mary's heart, but of her reason, and perhaps they originated in secret shyness and a dash of affectation. It may read as a paradox, but the very truth of Mary and her friends, conjoined with their strong enthusiasm for nature and art—such as they knew it— in letters, produced in themselves a sort of assumption of the disruption which they recognised between their dreams of battle-fields, conquerors, sacrifices, ovations, philosophers, poets, and Werter lovers, and their actual experience of human nature and its daily occurrences, and originated in them a half-laughing indignation at their being supposed to apply their bombastic poetry, with its woof of fustian and its warp of gold, to their own prosaic cases; in short, they pretended to a de

gree of sententiousness and moderation far beyond what was probable, not to say desirable. Their warm hearts were unawakened to the one master-influence of their lives, and so they cleverly ignored its existence or clipped its proportions, and then argued upon the void or the poor puny dwarf to which they had reduced it very sagely and sometimes very wittily. Do not say that they were hard and masculine and repulsive, these Mary Aldours. Did not the chivalrous genius that rose upon the century acknowledge their charms in his dear friend Miss Cranstoun, and reproduce them invested with the glow of adventure and the glory of his gift divine in Die Vernon? But as young Dunglas was in no trouble or difficulty that Mary knew of, save in that tolerably undignified one from the thralls of Croclune, Mary's heart had not really awakened to him, and there was not the slightest indication at present of that fleeting airy speculation of hers acquiring a local habitation and a name. Therefore it was not from mere personal motives that Mary was interested in the liberty of John Dunglasit was from charity, if charity, of a somewhat onesided description.

There was Finralia, half-shunned, half-feared by the congregation, and shrugging his shoulders at thẹ whole party.

And there was Anne Macdonald, a low country cousin and visitor at Aldour. This Anne must have her separate chronicle. She was the daughter of a Macdonnel who had rubbed against the prejudices