attire she wore, denied that they had ever been dazzled with it,
and ceased to believe that she had danced minuets in the Assembly Rooms
before Miss Jacky Murray. They had their own company and their own
stories, into which they had no temptation to drag an interloper.

Nelly, in her desolation standing apart in the centre of the wholesome,
happy family circle, grew to have her peculiar habits and occupations,
her self-contained life into which none of the others could penetrate.

V.--NELLY'S NEW PASTIMES.

The sea-pink and the rock saxifrage were making the rugged rocks gay,
the bluebell was nodding on the moor, and Nelly had not died, as she
foolishly fancied she should. She had learned to wander out along the
shore or over the trackless moor for hours and hours, and often returned
footsore and exhausted. She who had been accustomed only to the
Canongate and High Street of Edinburgh, the tall houses with their
occasional armorial bearings, the convenient huckster shops--their
irregular line intersected by the strait closes, the traffic and gossip;
or to the forsaken royal palace, and the cowslips of the King's
Park--could now watch the red sunset burnishing miles on miles of waving
heather, and the full moon hanging above the restless tide. She could
listen to the surf in the storm, and the ripple in the calm, to the cry
of the gull and the wh-r-r of the moorcock; pull wild thyme, and pick up
rose-tinted shells and perforated stones; and watch shyly her hardy
cottar servants cutting peats and tying up flax, and even caught
snatches of their rude Border lore of raid and foray under doughty
Homes, who wore steel cap and breastplate.

The coast-line at Staneholme was high and bold, but in place of
descending sheerly and precipitately to the yellow sands, it sloped in a
green bank, broken by gullies, where the long sea-grass grew in tangled
tufts, interspersed with the yellow leaves of the fern, and in whose
sheltered recesses Nelly Carnegie so often lingered, that she left them
to future generations as "Lady Staneholme's Walks."

There she could see the London smacks and foreign luggers beating up to
ride at the pier of Leith. There she could sit for hours, half-hidden,
and protected from the sea blast, mechanically pulling to pieces the
dried, blackened seaweed blown up among the small, prickly blush roses.
In her green quilted petticoat and spencer she might have been one of
the "good people's changelings," only