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 frequently to have annoyed the city of Edinburgh, by
intercepting the supplies and merchandise which came to the town from the
southward.
This village, its tower, and its church, did not lie precisely in Jeanie's road
towards England; but they were not much aside from it, and the village was the
abode of Butler. She had resolved to see him in the beginning of her journey,
because she conceived him the most proper person to write to her father
concerning her resolution and her hopes. There was probably another reason
