lumes that have been multiplied on a subject which has been
more spoiled by poetical imagery, than benefited by sober observation.

Within about five years of the death of the husband and father, old
Hayston died, and left Whitecraigs to his only son, Hector, who was kind
enough to continue the gift of the father to the inmates of Homestead;
but he loaded them with a condition, unspoken, yet implied. The young
laird and the pretty cottage maiden had foregathered often amidst the
romantic scenes on the Lyne; and that which Nature probably intended as
a guard and a mean of segregation--the shrinking timidity of her own
mountain child, when looked upon by the eye of, to her,
aristocracy--only tended to an opposite effect. A poet has compared love
to an Eastern bird, which loses all its beauty when it flies, and it is
as true as it is a pretty conceit; but if there was any feathered
creature whose wings, reflecting, from its monaul tints, the sun in
greater splendour, when on the wing, it would supply as applicable and
not less poetical an emblem of the object of the little god's
heart-stirrings; and so it seemed to the young laird of Whitecraigs,
that, as Alice Scott bounded away over the green hills, or down by the
Lyne banks, at his approach, her flight added to the interest which she
had already inspired when she had no means of escape. But, as the
wildest doe may be caught and tamed, so was she, who was as a white one
removed from the herd. The young man possessed attractions beside those
of imputed wealth and station; and probably, though we mean not to be
severe upon the sex, the process by which his affection had been
increased was reversed in its effects upon her, to whom assiduous
seeking was as the assiduous retreating had been to him.

Yet all was, we believe, honourable in the intentions of young Hayston;
and, as for Alice, she was in the primeval condition of a total
unconsciousness of evil. The "one blossom on earth's tree," as the poet
has it, was by her yet unplucked, nor knew she how many thousands have
had cause to sing--

"I have plucked the one blossom that hangs on earth's tree;
I have lived--I have loved, and die."

Her former timidity was the _a priori_ proof of the strength of the
feeling that followed, when the sensitiveness of fear gave way to
confidence. Town loves are a thing of sorry account: the best of them
are a mere preference of the one to the many; and he who is fortunate
enoug