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                              FIRST LOVE.

                                A NOVEL
                           IN THREE VOLUMES.


                                VOL. I.


                                LONDON:
                  SAUNDERS AND OTLEY, CONDUIT STREET.

                                 1830.




  LONDON:
  IBOTSON AND PALMER, PRINTERS, SAVOY-STREET, STRAND.




All the mottoes annexed to the chapters of this work, have been
selected from the Author's dramatic and other poetical works, not yet
published.




FIRST LOVE.




CHAPTER I.

  "No hut shelters Comala from the rain."


A family of travelling vagrants were overtaken on the high road
just leading out of Keswick, on the Penrith side, by a gentleman
on horseback. He had observed the same group begging during the
entertainments of the regatta which had concluded but the evening
before.

"Ho! ho! my good woman," he said, as he passed in a sling trot, "I am
glad to see your boy has found his second leg!"

The woman, who appeared to be young, and who would have been handsome,
had not dirt and impudence rendered her disgusting, looked behind her,
and perceived that a poor, sickly, ragged child, apparently about five
years old, who followed her, tired of his crutches, which pushed up his
little shoulders almost out of their sockets, had contrived to loosen
the bandage of his tied-up leg, and slip it down out of the dirty linen
bag, in which it usually hung on the double, and from which it was not
always released, even at night, as so doing necessarily incurred the