lat occupied by good Mistress Waddel,
situated at the very top of this stony region. Mrs. Waddel was at the
door ready to receive them. She showed them into a comfortable
sitting-room with windows fronting the street, where a bright fire was
blazing in a very old-fashioned grate. She welcomed her new lodgers with
a torrent of kindly words, pronounced in the broadest Scotch dialect,
only half understood by the English portion of her audience.

A large portly personage was Mrs. Waddel,--ugly, amiable, and by no
means particular in her dress; which consisted of a woollen plaid, very
much faded, and both ragged and dirty. Her large mutch with its broad
frills formed a sort of glory round her head, setting off to no
advantage her pock-marked, flabby face, wide mouth and yellow projecting
teeth. She had a comical, good-natured obliquity of vision in her
prominent light-grey eyes, which were very red about the rims; and Flora
thought, as she read with an inquiring eye the countenance of their
landlady, that without being positively disgusting, she was the most
ordinary, uncouth woman she ever beheld.

Mrs. Waddel was eloquent in the praise of her apartments, which she said
had been occupied by my Leddy W. when his Majesty George the Fourth, God
bless his saucy face, landed at Leith, on his visit to Scotland. Her
lodgings, it seemed, had acquired quite an aristocratic character since
the above-named circumstance; and not a day passed, but the good woman
enumerated all the particulars of that memorable visit. But her own
autobiography was the stock theme with the good landlady. The most
minute particulars of her private history she daily divulged, to the
unspeakable delight of the mischievous laughter-loving James Hawke, who,
because he saw that it annoyed Mrs. Lyndsay, was sure to lead the
conversation slily to some circumstance which never failed to place the
honest-hearted Scotchwoman on her high-horse: and then she would
talk,--ye gods!--how she would talk--and splutter away in her broad
provincial dialect, until the wicked boy was convulsed with laughter.

"Ay, Mister Jeames," she would say, "ye will a' be maken' yer fun o' a'
puir auld bodie, but 'tis na' cannie o' ye."

"Making fun of _you_, Mrs. Waddel," said he, with a sly glance at Flora,
"how can you take such an odd notion into your head! It is so good of
you to tell me all about your courtship: it's giving me a hint of how
I'm to go about it when I'm a man. I am