ns extended to sending company from his own house to hers.

"There is a friend," answered Morton, "whom I am to meet with there, and
I only called here to take a stirrup-cup and inquire the way."

"Your honour had better," answerd the landlord, with the perseverance of
his calling, "send some ane to warn your friend to come on here."

"I tell you, landlord," answered Morton, impatiently, "that will not
serve my purpose; I must go straight to this woman Maclure's house, and
I desire you to find me a guide."

"Aweel, sir, ye'll choose for yoursell, to be sure," said Niel Blane,
somewhat disconcerted; "but deil a guide ye'll need if ye gae doun the
water for twa mile or sae, as gin ye were bound for Milnwoodhouse, and
then tak the first broken disjasked-looking road that makes for the
hills,--ye'll ken 't by a broken ash-tree that stands at the side o' a
burn just where the roads meet; and then travel out the path,--ye canna
miss Widow Maclure's public, for deil another house or hauld is on the
road for ten lang Scots miles, and that's worth twenty English. I am
sorry your honour would think o' gaun out o' my house the night. But my
wife's gude-sister is a decent woman, and it's no lost that a friend
gets."

Morton accordingly paid his reckoning and departed. The sunset of the
summer day placed him at the ash-tree, where the path led up towards the
moors.

"Here," he said to himself, "my misfortunes commenced; for just here,
when Burley and I were about to separate on the first night we ever met,
he was alarmed by the intelligence that the passes were secured by
soldiers lying in wait for him. Beneath that very ash sate the old woman
who apprised him of his danger. How strange that my whole fortunes should
have become inseparably interwoven with that man's, without anything more
on my part than the discharge of an ordinary duty of humanity! Would to
Heaven it were possible I could find my humble quiet and tranquillity of
mind upon the spot where I lost them!"

Thus arranging his reflections betwixt speech and thought, he turned his
horse's head up the path.

Evening lowered around him as he advanced up the narrow dell which had
once been a wood, but was now a ravine divested of trees, unless where a
few, from their inaccessible situation on the edge of precipitous banks,
or clinging among rocks and huge stones, defied the invasion of men and
of cattle, like the scattered tribes of a conquered country, driven to
ta