s in no degree disqualifying them from their
proper duties as wives or daughters. And my circle of acquaintance
included the entire class. I used to meet them at delightful
tea-parties, and sometimes borrowed a day from my work to conduct them
through the picturesque burn of Eathie, or the wild scenes of Cromarty
Hill, or to introduce them to the fossiliferous deposits of the Lias or
the Old Red Sandstone. And not unfrequently their evening walks used to
terminate where I wrought, in the old chapel of St. Regulus, or in the
parish burying-ground, beside a sweet wooded dell known as the "Ladies'
Walk;" and my labours for the day closed in what I always very much
relished--a conversation on the last good book, or on some new organism,
recently disinterred, of the Secondary or Palaeozoic period.

I had been hewing, about this time, in the upper part of my uncle's
garden, and had just closed my work for the evening, when I was visited
by one of my lady friends, accompanied by a stranger lady, who had come
to see a curious old dial-stone which I had dug out of the earth long
before, when a boy, and which had originally belonged to the ancient
Castle-garden of Cromarty. I was standing with them beside the dial,
which I had placed in my uncle's garden, and remarking, that as it
exhibited in its structure no little mathematical skill, it had probably
been cut under the eye of the eccentric but accomplished Sir Thomas
Urquhart; when a third lady, greatly younger than the others, and whom I
had never seen before, came hurriedly tripping down the garden-walk,
and, addressing the other two apparently quite in a flurry--"O, come,
come away," she said, "I have been seeking you ever so long." "Is this
you, L----?" was the staid reply: "Why, what now?--you have run yourself
out of breath." The young lady was, I saw, very pretty; and though in
her nineteenth year at the time, her light and somewhat _petite_ figure,
and the waxen clearness of her complexion, which resembled rather that
of a fair child than of a grown woman, made her look from three to four
years younger. And as if in some degree still a child, her two lady
friends seemed to regard her. She stayed with them scarce a minute ere
she tripped off again; nor did I observe that she favoured me with a
single glance. But what else could be expected by an ungainly,
dust-besprinkled mechanic in his shirt sleeves, and with a leathern
apron before him? Nor _did_ the mechanic expect au