rove them thither. It occurred to me to answer her by
recounting the legend of the rise of my family, and of our deriving our
name from a particular place near Holyrood Palace. This, which would
have appeared to most people a very absurd reason for choosing a
residence, was entirely satisfactory to Janet MacEvoy.

"Och, nae doubt! if it was the land of her fathers, there was nae mair
to be said. Put it was queer that her family estate should just lie at
the town tail, and covered with houses, where the King's cows--Cot bless
them, hide and horn--used to craze upon. It was strange changes."
She mused a little, and then added: "Put it is something better wi'
Croftangry when the changes is frae the field to the habited place,
and not from the place of habitation to the desert; for Shanet, her
nainsell, kent a glen where there were men as weel as there may be in
Croftangry, and if there werena altogether sae mony of them, they were
as good men in their tartan as the others in their broadcloth. And there
were houses, too; and if they were not biggit with stane and lime, and
lofted like the houses at Croftangry, yet they served the purpose of
them that lived there, and mony a braw bonnet, and mony a silk snood
and comely white curch, would come out to gang to kirk or chapel on
the Lord's day, and little bairns toddling after. And now--Och, Och,
Ohellany, Ohonari! the glen is desolate, and the braw snoods and bonnets
are gane, and the Saxon's house stands dull and lonely, like the single
bare-breasted rock that the falcon builds on--the falcon that drives the
heath-bird frae the glen."

Janet, like many Highlanders, was full of imagination, and, when
melancholy themes came upon her, expressed herself almost poetically,
owing to the genius of the Celtic language in which she thought, and in
which, doubtless, she would have spoken, had I understood Gaelic. In two
minutes the shade of gloom and regret had passed from her good-humoured
features, and she was again the little, busy, prating, important old
woman, undisputed owner of one flat of a small tenement in the Abbey
Yard, and about to be promoted to be housekeeper to an elderly bachelor
gentleman, Chrystal Croftangry, Esq.

It was not long before Janet's local researches found out exactly the
sort of place I wanted, and there we settled. Janet was afraid I would
not be satisfied, because it is not exactly part of Croftangry; but I
stopped her doubts by assuring her it had b