f life and of undergoing fatigue, she was
now amply or even superfluously provided with the means of encountering
the expenses of the road, up and down from London, and all other expenses
whatever.

CHAPTER THIRD

What strange and wayward thoughts will slide
Into a lover's head;
"O mercy!" to myself I cried,
"If Lucy should be dead!"
Wordsworth.

In pursuing her solitary journey, our heroine, soon after passing the
house of Dumbiedikes, gained a little eminence, from which, on looking to
the eastward down a prattling brook, whose meanders were shaded with
straggling widows and alder trees, she could see the cottages of Woodend
and Beersheba, the haunts and habitation of her early life, and could
distinguish the common on which she had so often herded sheep, and the
recesses of the rivulet where she had pulled rushes with Butler, to plait
crowns and sceptres for her sister Effie, then a beautiful but spoiled
child, of about three years old. The recollections which the scene
brought with them were so bitter, that, had she indulged them, she would
have sate down and relieved her heart with tears.

"But I ken'd," said Jeanie, when she gave an account of her pilgrimage,
"that greeting would do but little good, and that it was mair beseeming
to thank the Lord, that had showed me kindness and countenance by means
of a man, that mony ca'd a Nabal, and churl, but wha was free of his
gudes to me, as ever the fountain was free of the stream. And I minded
the Scripture about the sin of Israel at Meribah, when the people
murmured, although Moses had brought water from the dry rock that the
congregation might drink and live. Sae, I wad not trust mysell with
another look at puir Woodend, for the very blue reek that came out of the
lum-head pat me in mind of the change of market days with us."

In this resigned and Christian temper she pursued her journey until she
was beyond this place of melancholy recollections, and not distant from
the village where Butler dwelt, which, with its old-fashioned church and
steeple, rises among a tuft of trees, occupying the ridge of an eminence
to the south of Edinburgh. At a quarter of a mile's distance is a clumsy
square tower, the residence of the Laird of Liberton, who, in former
times, with the habits of the predatory chivalry of Germany, is said