er are every day stealing away her
sweethearts.

Through the whole of the previous stages Nelly Kilgour had passed; and
she had now arrived at this important question, which, as has been
just said, is the last a woman can put to herself. She had seen her
admirers, one after another, come and look in her face, and continue
their visits, their smiles, and their conversation for a season, and
then go away and leave her, as if they had got nothing else to do. She
had spent a considerable portion of her life, as has been already
observed, in serving the lieges in and about the place of her
nativity--to no purpose, as it appeared; at least, in so far as the
getting of the husband was concerned, nothing had been effected. The
proper season for securing this desideratum of the female world was
fast wearing away; something, she saw, must of necessity be done; and,
thinking that women, like some other commodities, might sell better at
a distance than at home, she engaged herself as a servant on the
little farm of _Howdycraigs_--a place situated among that portion of
the Ochils already noticed.

When she entered upon this engagement, which was to last for a year,
she was spoken of as "a weel _reikit_ lass"--the meaning of which
phrase is, that she had already provided what was considered a
woman's part of the furnishing of a house; and some of the sober
matrons "wondered what had come owre a' the lads noo," and said, "they
were sure Nelly Kilgour wad mak a better wife than ony o' thae young
glaikit hizzies wha carried a' their reikin to the kirk on their back
ilka Sabbath." But, of Nelly's being made a wife, there was no
prospect; she was _three-and-thirty_; so far as was known, no lover
had ever ventured to throw himself upon his knees before her, begging
to be permitted to kiss her _foot_, and threatening, at the same time,
to _hang himself_, if she did not consent to be his better half; still
there was no appearance of any one doing so; and those who delighted
in tracing effects back to their proper causes, began to recollect
that her mother, "when she was a thoughtless lassie," had once given
some offence to one of the witches, who were accused of holding
nightly revels in the glen; and the witch, by way of retaliation, had
said, that "the bairn unborn would maybe hae cause to rue its mother's
impudence." Nelly had been born after this oracular saying was
uttered; and the aged dames who remembered it doubted not that this
w