in themselves as if to avoid it, while they are only courting
its effects in the play of an imagination much too ardent for the duties
of life; and, as a consequence, how they seek secretly the support of
stronger natures, clinging to them as do those strange plants called
parasites, which, with their tender arms and something so like fingers,
cling to the nearest stem of a stouter neighbour, and embracing it, even
though hollow and rotten, cover it, and choke it with a flood of
flowers. So true is it that woman, like the generous vine, lives by
being supported and held up; yet equally true that the strength she
gains is from the embrace she gives; and so it is also that goodness, as
our Scottish poet Home says, often wounds itself, and affection proves
the spring of sorrow.

All which might truly be applied to Mysie Craig; but as yet the stronger
stem to which she clung was her mother, and it was not likely, nor was
it in reality, that that affection would prove to her anything but the
spring of happiness, for it was ripened by love; and the earnings of the
nimble fingers, moving often into the still hours of the night, not only
kept the wolf from the door, but let in the lambs of domestic harmony
and peace. Would that these things had so continued! But there are other
wolves than those of poverty, and the "ae lamb o' the fauld" cannot be
always under the protection of the ewe; and it so happened on a certain
night, not particularized in the calendar, that our Mysie, having
finished one of these floral petticoats on which she had been engaged
for many weeks, went forth with her precious burden to deliver the same
to its impatient owner, no other than the then famous Anabella Gilroy,
who resided in Advocate's Close--of which fine lady, by the way, we may
say, that of all the gay creatures who paraded between "the twa Bows,"
no one displayed such ample folds of brocaded silk, nodded her pon-pons
more jauntily, or napped with a sharper crack her high-heeled shoes, all
to approve herself to "the bucks" of the time, with their square coats
brocaded with lace, their three-cornered hats on the top of their
bob-wigs, their knee-buckles and shoe-buckles. And certainly not the
least important of those, both in his own estimation and that of the
sprightly Anabella, was George Balgarnie, a young man who had only a
year before succeeded to the property of Balgruddery, somewhere in the
north, and of whom we might say that, in forming