away
to destroy all of them. I knew that when, through the disorder of my
affairs, my mother underwent some temporary inconvenience about money
matters, Christie, as a thing of course, stood in the gap, and having
sold a small inheritance which had descended to her, brought the
purchase money to her mistress, with a sense of devotion as deep as that
which inspired the Christians of the first age, when they sold all they
had, and followed the apostles of the church. I therefore thought that
we might, in old Scottish phrase, "let byganes be byganes," and
begin upon a new account. Yet I resolved, like a skilful general,
to reconnoitre a little before laying down any precise scheme of
proceeding, and in the interim I determined to preserve my incognito.

CHAPTER IV. MR. CROFTANGRY BIDS ADIEU TO CLYDESDALE.

Alas, how changed from what it once had been!
'Twas now degraded to a common inn. GAY.

An hour's brisk walking, or thereabouts, placed me in front of
Duntarkin, which had also, I found, undergone considerable alterations,
though it had not been altogether demolished like the principal
mansion. An inn-yard extended before the door of the decent little
jointure-house, even amidst the remnants of the holly hedges which had
screened the lady's garden. Then a broad, raw-looking, new-made road
intruded itself up the little glen, instead of the old horseway, so
seldom used that it was almost entirely covered with grass. It is
a great enormity, of which gentlemen trustees on the highways are
sometimes guilty, in adopting the breadth necessary for an avenue to the
metropolis, where all that is required is an access to some sequestered
and unpopulous district. I do not say anything of the expense--that
the trustees and their constituents may settle as they please. But the
destruction of silvan beauty is great when the breadth of the road is
more than proportioned to the vale through which it runs, and lowers, of
course, the consequence of any objects of wood or water, or broken and
varied ground, which might otherwise attract notice and give pleasure.
A bubbling runnel by the side of one of those modern Appian or Flaminian
highways is but like a kennel; the little hill is diminished to a
hillock--the romantic hillock to a molehill, almost too small for sight.

Such an enormity, however, had destroyed the quiet loneliness of
Duntarkin, and intruded its breadth of dust and gravel, and its
associations of pochays and