o gain
a place in the customs, and, being a frugal, careful man, had found
himself enabled to add considerably to his paternal fortune. He had only
two sons, of whom, as we have hinted, the present laird was the younger,
and two daughters, one of whom still flourished in single blessedness,
and the other, who was greatly more juvenile, made a love-match with a
captain in the Forty-twa, who had no other fortune but his commission
and a Highland pedigree. Poverty disturbed a union which love would
otherwise have made happy, and Captain M'Intyre, in justice to his wife
and two children, a boy and girl, had found himself obliged to seek his
fortune in the East Indies. Being ordered upon an expedition against
Hyder Ally, the detachment to which he belonged was cut off, and no news
ever reached his unfortunate wife, whether he fell in battle, or was
murdered in prison, or survived in what the habits of the Indian tyrant
rendered a hopeless captivity. She sunk under the accumulated load of
grief and uncertainty, and left a son and daughter to the charge of her
brother, the existing Laird of Monkbarns.

The history of that proprietor himself is soon told. Being, as we have
said, a second son, his father destined him to a share in a substantial
mercantile concern, carried on by some of his maternal relations. From
this Jonathan's mind revolted in the most irreconcilable manner. He was
then put apprentice to the profession of a writer, or attorney, in which
he profited so far, that he made himself master of the whole forms
of feudal investitures, and showed such pleasure in reconciling their
incongruities, and tracing their origin, that his master had great
hope he would one day be an able conveyancer. But he halted upon the
threshold, and, though he acquired some knowledge of the origin and
system of the law of his country, he could never be persuaded to
apply it to lucrative and practical purposes. It was not from any
inconsiderate neglect of the advantages attending the possession
of money that he thus deceived the hopes of his master. "Were he
thoughtless or light-headed, or rei suae prodigus," said his instructor,
"I would know what to make of him. But he never pays away a shilling
without looking anxiously after the change, makes his sixpence go
farther than another lad's half-crown, and wilt ponder over an old
black-letter copy of the acts of parliament for days, rather than go to
the golf or the change-house; and yet he w