ttle sharpened
and exaggerated by the works which fell into her hands.

Tenderly loved and gently nurtured by her parents, it was at that period
in her life in which their presence and guardianship were most seriously
needed, that she became an orphan; and her future charge necessarily
devolved upon an uncle, between whom and her father, since their early
manhood, but little association of any kind had taken place. The one
looked upon the other as too licentious, if not criminally so, in his
habits and pursuits; he did not know their extent, or dream of their
character, or he had never doubted for an instant; while he, in turn, so
estimated, did not fail to consider and to style his more sedate brother
an inveterate and tedious proser; a dull sermonizer on feelings which he
knew nothing about, and could never understand--one who prosed on to the
end of the chapter, without charm or change, worrying all about him with
exhortations to which they yielded no regard.

The parties were fairly quits, and there was no love lost between them.
They saw each other but seldom, and, when the surviving brother took up
his abode in the _new purchase_, as the Indian acquisitions of modern
times have been usually styled, he was lost sight of, for a time,
entirely, by his more staid and worthy kinsman.

Still, Edgar Munro did not look upon his brother as utterly bad. A wild
indifference to social forms, and those staid customs which in the
estimation of society become virtues, was, in his idea, the most serious
error of which Walter had been guilty. In this thought he persisted to
the last, and did not so much feel the privations to which his death
must subject his child, in the belief and hope that his brother would
not only be able but willing to supply the loss.

In one respect he was not mistaken. The afflictions which threw the
niece of Walter a dependant upon his bounty, and a charge upon his
attention, revived in some measure his almost smothered and in part
forgotten regards of kindred; and with a tolerably good grace he came
forward to the duty, and took the orphan to the asylum, such as it was,
to which his brother's death-bed prayer had recommended her. At first,
there was something to her young mind savoring of the romance to which
she had rather given herself up, in the notion of a woodland cottage,
and rural sports, and wild vines gadding fantastically around secluded
bowers; but the reality--the sad reality of such a ho