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Wilson's

Tales of the Borders

AND OF SCOTLAND.

HISTORICAL, TRADITIONARY, & IMAGINATIVE.

WITH A GLOSSARY.

REVISED BY
ALEXANDER LEIGHTON,
ONE OF THE ORIGINAL EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS.

VOL. IX.

LONDON:
WALTER SCOTT, 14 PATERNOSTER SQUARE.
AND NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE.
1885.




CONTENTS.


                                                     Page.

  THE <DW36>; OR, EBENEZER THE DISOWNED
  (_John Mackay Wilson_)                                1

  THE LEGEND OF FAIR HELEN OF KIRCONNEL
  (_Alexander Leighton_)                               23

  TOM DUNCAN'S YARN (_Oliver Richardson_)              55

  THE PROFESSOR'S TALES (_Professor Thomas Gillespie_)

    THE THREE BRETHREN                                 87

    THE MISTAKE RECTIFIED                              97

    DURA DEN; OR, SECOND THOUGHTS ARE BEST            106

  THE LAIRD OF LUCKY'S HOW (_Alexander Campbell_)     119

  THE ABDUCTION (_Alexander Leighton_)                151

  SIR PATRICK HUME: A TALE OF THE HOUSE OF MARCHMONT
  (_John Mackay Wilson_)                              167

  THE SERJEANT'S TALES (_John Howell_)

    THE PACKMAN'S JOURNEY TO LONDON                   178

  CHARLES LAWSON (_John Mackay Wilson_)               210

  BON GAULTIER'S TALES (_Theodore Martin_)

    MRS. HUMPHREY GREENWOOD'S TEA-PARTY               217

  THE RECLUSE OF THE HEBRIDES (_Walter Logan_)        230

  ELLEN ARUNDEL (_Walter Logan_)                      238

  CHATELARD (_Alexander Campbell_)                    243

  CHRISTIE OF THE CLEEK (_Alexander Leighton_)        275




WILSON'S

TALES OF THE BORDERS,

AND OF SCOTLAND.




THE <DW36>; OR, EBENEZER THE DISOWNED.


It is proverbial to say, with reference to particular constitutions or
habits of body, that May is a _trying_ month, and we have known what it
is to experience its trials in the sense signified. With our
grandmothers too, yea, and with our grandfathers also, May was held to
be an unlucky month. Nevertheless, it is a lovely, it is a beautiful
month, and the forerunner of the most healthy of the twelve. It is like
a timid maiden blushing into womanhood, wooing and yet shrinking from
the admiration which her beauty compels. The buds, the blossoms, the
young leaves, the tender flowers, the glittering dew-drops, and the song
of birds, burst from the grasp of winter as if the God of nature
whispered in the sunbeams--"Let there be life!" But it is in the morning
only, and before the business of the world summons us to its mechanical
and artificial realities, that the beauties of May can be felt in all
their freshness. We read of the glories of Eden, and that the earth was
cursed because of man's transgression; yet, when we look abroad upon the
glowing landscape, above us, and around us, and behold the pure heavens
like a sea of music floating over us, and hear the earth answer it back
in varied melody, while mountain, wood, and dale, seem dreaming in the
sound, and stealing into loveliness, we almost wonder that a bad man
should exist in the midst of a world that is still so beautiful, and
where every object around him is a representative of the wisdom, the
goodness, the mercy, the purity, and the omnipotence of his Creator.
There is a language in the very wild-flowers among our feet that
breathes a lesson of virtue. We can appreciate the feeling with which
the poet beheld

  "The _last_ rose of summer left blooming alone;"

but in the firstlings of the spring, the primrose, the lily, and their
early train, there is an appeal that passes beyond our senses. They are
like the lispings and the smiles of infancy--lowly preachers, emblems of
our own immortality, and we love them like living things. They speak to
us of childhood and the scenes of youth, and _memory_ dwells in their
very fragrance. Yes, May is a beautiful month--it is a month of fair
sights and of sweet sounds. To it belongs the lowly primrose blushing by
the brae-side in congregated beauty, with here and there a cowslip
bending over them like a lover among the flowers; the lily hanging its
head by the brook that reflects its image, like a bride at the altar, as
if conscious of its own loveliness; the hardy daisy on the green sward,
like a proud man struggling in penury with the storms of fate. Now, too,
the blossoms on a thousand trees unfold their rainbow hues; the tender
leaves seem instinct with life, and expand to the sunbeams; and the
bright fields, like an emerald sea, wave their first undulations to the
breeze. The lark pours down a flood of melody on the nest of its mate,
and the linnet trills a lay of love to its partner from the yellow
furze. The chaffinch chants in the hedge its sweet but unvaried _line of
music_; the thrush hymns his bold roundelay; and the blackbird swells
the chorus; while the bird of spring sends its voice from the glens,
like a wandering echo lost between love and sadness; and the swallow,
newly returned from warmer climes or its winter sleep,

  "Twitters from the straw-built shed."

The insect tribe leap into being, countless in numbers and matchless in
livery, and their low hum swims like the embodiment of a dream in the
air. The May-fly invites the angler to the river, while the minnow
gambols in the brook; the young salmon sports and sparkles in the
stream, and the grey trout glides slowly beneath the shadow of a rock in
the deep pool. To enjoy for a single hour in a May morning the luxuries
which nature spreads around--to wander in its fields and in its
woods--to feel ourselves a part of God's glad creation--to _feel_ the
gowan under our feet, and health circulating through our veins with the
refreshing breeze, is a recipe worth all in the Materia Medica.

Now, it was before sunrise on such a morning in May as I have described,
that a traveller left the Black Bull in Wooler, and proceeded to the
Cheviots. He took his route by way of Earle and Langleeford; and, at the
latter place, leaving the long and beautiful glen, began to ascend the
mountain. On the cairn, which is perhaps about five hundred yards from
what is called the extreme summit of the mountain, he met an old and
intelligent shepherd, from whom he heard many tales, the legends of the
mountains--and amongst others, the following story:--

Near the banks of one of the romantic streams which take their rise
among the Cheviots, stood a small and pleasant, and what might be termed
respectable or genteel-looking building. It stood like the home of
solitude, excluded by mountains from the world. Beneath it, the rivulet
wandered over its rugged bed; to the east rose Cheviot, the giant of the
hills; to the west, lesser mountains reared their fantastic forms,
thinly studded here and there with dwarf alders, which the birds of
heaven had planted, and their progeny had nestled in their branches; to
the north and the south stretched a long and secluded glen, where beauty
blushed in the arms of wildness--and thick woods, where the young fir
and the oak of the ancient forest grew together, flourished beneath the
shelter of the hills. Fertility also smiled by the sides of the rivulet,
though the rising and setting sun threw the shadows of barrenness over
it. Around the cottage stood a clump of solitary firs, and behind it an
enclosure of alders, twisted together, sheltered a garden from the
storms that swept down the hills.

Now, many years ago, a stranger woman, who brought with her a female
domestic and a male infant, became the occupant of this house among the
hills. She lived more luxuriously than the sheep-farmers in the
neighbourhood, and her accent was not that of the Borders. She was
between forty and fifty years of age, and her stature and strength were
beyond the ordinary stature and strength of women. Her manners were
repulsive, and her bearing haughty; but it seemed the haughtiness of a
weak and uneducated mind. Her few neighbours, simple though they were,
and little as they saw or knew of the world, its inhabitants and its
manners, perceived that the stranger who had come amongst them had not
been habituated to the affluence or easy circumstances with which she
was then surrounded. The child also was hard-favoured, and of a
disagreeable countenance; his back was strangely deformed; his feet were
distorted, and his limbs of unequal length. No one could look upon the
child without a feeling of compassion, save the woman who was his
mother, his nurse, or his keeper (for none knew in what relation she
stood to him), and she treated him as a persecutor, who hated his sight,
and was weary of his existence.

She gave her name as Mrs Baird; and, as the child grew up, she generally
in derision called him "_AEsop_," or, in hatred, "the little monster!"
but the woman-servant called him Ebenezer, though she treated him with a
degree of harshness only less brutal than she whom he began to call
mother. We shall, therefore, in his history mention him by the name of
Ebenezer Baird. As he grew in years, the disagreeable expression of his
countenance became stronger, his deformity and lameness increased, and
the treatment he had experienced added to both.

When nine years of age, he was sent to a boarding-school about twelve
miles distant. Here a new series of persecutions awaited him. Until the
day of his entering the school, he was almost ignorant that there was an
alphabet. He knew not a letter. He had seen one or two books, but he
knew not their use: he had never seen any one look upon them; he
regarded them merely as he did a picture--a piece of useless furniture,
or a plaything. Lame as he was, he had climbed the steep and the
dripping precipice for the eggs of the water-ouzel, sought among the
crags for the young of the gorgeous kingfisher, or climbed the tallest
trees in quest of the crested wrens, which chirped and fluttered in
invisible swarms among the branches.[A] The birds were to him
companions; he wished to rear their young, that they might love him, for
there was a lack of something in his heart--he knew not what it was--but
it was the void of being beloved, of being regarded. It is said that
nature abhors a vacuum, and so did the heart of Ebenezer. He knew not
what name to give it, but he longed for something that would show a
liking for him, and to which he could show a liking in return. The heart
is wicked, but it is not unsocial--its affections wither in
solitariness. When he strolled forth on these rambles about the glen,
having asked the permission of his mother or keeper (call her what you
will) before he went, "Go, imp! AEsop!" she was wont to exclaim, "and I
shall pray that you may break your neck before you return." There were
no farmers' or shepherds' children within several miles: he had seen
some of them, and when they had seen him, they had laughed at his
deformity--they had imitated his lameness, and contorted their
countenances into a caricatured resemblance of his. Such were poor
Ebenezer's acquirements, and such his acquaintance with human nature,
when he entered the boarding-school. A primer was put into his hands.
"What must I do with it?" thought Ebenezer. He beheld the rod of
correction in the hands of the teacher, and he trembled--for his
misshapen shoulders were familiar with such an instrument. He heard
others read, he saw them write; and he feared, wondered, and trembled
the more. He thought that he would be called upon to do the same, and he
knew he could not. He had no idea of _learning_--he had never heard of
such a thing. He thought that he must do as he saw others doing at once,
and he cast many troubled looks at the lord of a hundred boys. When the
name of "Ebenezer Baird" was called out, he burst into tears, he sobbed,
terror overwhelmed him. But when the teacher approached him kindly, took
him from his seat, placed him between his knees, patted his head, and
desired him to speak after him, the heart of the little <DW36> was
assured, and more than assured; it was the first time he had experienced
kindness, and he could have fallen on the ground and hugged the knees of
his master. The teacher, indeed, found Ebenezer the most ignorant
scholar he had ever met with, but he was no tyrant of the birch, though
to his pupils

  "A man severe he was, and stern to view;"

and though he had all the manners and austerity of the old school about
him, he did not lay his head upon the pillow with his arm tired by the
incessant use of the ferule. He was touched with the simplicity and the
extreme ignorance of his new boarder, and he felt also for his lameness
and deformity. Thrice he went over the alphabet with his pupil,
commencing, "_Big Aw_--_Little Aw_," and having got over _b_, he told
him to remember that _c_ was like a half-moon. "Ye'll aye mind _c_
again," added he; "think ye _see_ the moon." Thus they went on to _g_,
and he asked him what the carters said to their horses when they wished
them to go faster; but this Ebenezer could not tell--carts and horses
were sights that he had seen as objects of wonder. They are but seldom
seen amongst the hills now, and in those days they were almost unknown.
Getting over _h_, he strove to impress _i_ upon the memory of his pupil,
by touching the solitary grey orbit in his countenance (for Ebenezer had
but one), and asking him what he called it. "My _e'e_," answered
Ebenezer.

"No, sir, you must not say your _e'e_, but your _eye_--mind that; and
that letter is _I_."

The teacher went on, showing him that he could not forget round O, and
crooked S; and in truth, after his first lesson, Ebenezer was master of
these two letters. And, afterwards, when the teacher, in trying him
promiscuously through the alphabet, would inquire, "What letter is
this?"--"I no ken," the <DW36> would reply; "but I'm sure it's no O,
and it's no S." Within a week he was master of the six-and-twenty
mystical symbols, with the exception of four--and those four were _b_
and _d_, _p_ and _q_. Ebenezer could not for three months be brought to
distinguish the _b_ from the _d_, nor the _p_ from the _q_; but he had
never even heard that he had a right hand and a left until he came to
the school--and how could it be expected?

Scarce, however, had he mastered the alphabet, until the faculties of
the deformed began to expand. He now both understood and felt what it
was to learn. He passed from class to class with a rapidity that
astonished his teacher. He could not join in the boisterous sports of
his schoolfellows, and while they were engaged in their pastime, he
sought solitude, and his task accompanied him. He possessed strong
natural talents, and his infirmities gave them the assistance of
industry. His teacher noted these things in the <DW36>, and he was
gratified with them; but he hesitated to express his feelings openly,
lest the charge of partiality should be brought against him. Ebenezer,
however, had entered the academy as the butt of his schoolfellows--they
mocked, they mimicked, they tormented, they despised, or affected to
despise him; and his talents and progress, instead of abating their
persecutions, augmented them. His teacher was afraid to show him more
kindness than he showed to others; and his schoolfellows gloried in
annoying the <DW36>--they persecuted, they shunned, they hated him more
than even his mother did. He began to hate the world, for he had found
none that would love him. His teacher was the only human being that had
ever whispered to him words of praise or of kindness, and that had
always been in cold, guarded, and measured terms.

Before he was eighteen, he had acquired all the knowledge that his
teacher could impart, and he returned to the cottage among the
mountains. There, however, he was again subjected to a persecution more
barbarous than that which he had met with from his schoolfellows. Mrs
Baird mocked, insulted, and drove him from her presence; and her
domestic showed him neither kindness nor respect. In stature, he
scarcely exceeded five feet; and his body was feeble as well as
deformed. The cruelty with which he had been treated had given an
asperity to his temper, and made him almost a hater of the human race;
and these feelings had lent their character to his countenance, marking
its naturally harsh expression with suspicion and melancholy.

He was about five-and-twenty when the pangs and the terrors of death
fell upon her whom he regarded as his parent. She died--as a sinner
dies--with insulted eternity frowning to receive her. A few minutes
before her death, she desired the <DW36> to approach her bedside. She
fixed her closing eyes, which affection had never lighted, upon his. She
informed him that he was not her son.

"Oh, tell me, then, whose son I am! Who are my parents?" he exclaimed,
eagerly. "Speak! speak!"

"Your parents!" she muttered; and remorse and ignorance held her
departing soul in their grasp. She struggled; she again continued: "Your
parents! no, Ebenezer, no! I dare not name them! I have sworn--I have
sworn! and a death-bed is no time to break an oath!"

"Speak! speak! Tell me, as you hope for heaven!" cried the <DW36>, with
his thin, bony fingers grasping the wrists of the dying woman.

"Monster! monster!" she screamed, wildly, and in terror, "leave
me--leave me! You are provided for--open that chest--the chest--the
chest!"

Ebenezer loosed his grasp; he sprang towards a strong chest which stood
in the room. "The keys! the keys!" he exclaimed, wildly; and again
hurrying to the bed, he violently pulled a bunch of keys from beneath
her pillow. But while he applied them to the chest, the herald of death
rattled in the throat of its victim; and, with one agonising throe and a
deep groan, her spirit escaped, and her body lay a corpse upon the bed.

He opened the chest, and in it he found securities, which settled upon
him, under the name of Ebenezer Baird, five thousand pounds. But there
was nothing which threw light on his parentage--nothing to inform who he
was, or why he was there.

The body of her who had never shed a tear over him he accompanied to the
grave. But now a deeper gloom fell upon him. He met but few men, and the
few he met shunned him, for there was a wildness and a bitterness in his
words--a railing against the world--which they wished not to hear. He
fancied, too, that they despised him--that their eyes were ever
examining the form of his deformities; and he returned their glance with
a scowl, and their words with the accents of hatred. Even as he passed
the solitary farmhouse, the younger children fled in terror, and the
elder laughed, or pointed towards him the finger of curiosity. All these
things fell upon the heart of the <DW36>, and turned the human kindness
of his bosom into gall. His companions became the solitude of the
mountains, and the silence of the woods. They heard his bitter
soliloquies without reviling him, or echo answered him in tones of
sympathy more mournful than his own. He sought a thing that he might
love, that might unlock his prisoned heart, or give life to its blighted
feelings. He loved the very primrose, because it was a thing of beauty,
and shrank not from his deformity as man did. To him it gave forth its
sweetness, and its leaves withered not at his touch; and he bent and
kissed the flower that smiled upon him whom his kind avoided. He courted
the very storms of winter, for they shunned him not, but spent their
fury on his person, unconscious of its form. The only living thing that
regarded him, or that had ever evinced affection towards him, was a dog,
of the mastiff kind, which ever followed at his side, licked his hand,
and received its food from it. And on this living thing all the
affections that his heart ever felt were expended. He loved it as a
companion, a friend, and protector; and he knew it was not
ungrateful--it never avoided him; but, when mockery or insult was
offered to its master, it growled, and looked in his face, as if asking
permission to punish the offender.

Such was the life that he had passed until he was between thirty and
forty years of age. Still he continued his solitary rambles, having a
feeling for everything around him but man. Man only was his
persecutor--man only despised him. His own kind and his own kindred had
shut him out from them and disowned him--his sight had been hateful to
them, and his form loathsome. He avoided the very sun, for it revealed
his shadow; but he wandered in rapture, gazing on the midnight heavens,
calling the stars by name, while his soul was lifted up with their
glory, and his deformity lost and overshadowed in the depth of their
magnificence. He loved the flowers of day, the song of morning birds,
and the wildness or beauty of the landscape; but these dwindled, and
drew not forth his soul as did the awful gorgeousness of night, with its
ten thousand worlds lighted up, burning, sparkling, glimmering in
immensity--the gems that studded the throne of the Eternal. While others
slept, the deformed wandered on the mountains, holding communion with
the heavens.

About the period we refer to, a gay party came upon a visit to a
gentleman whose mansion was situated about three miles from the cottage
of the <DW36>. As they rode out, they frequently passed him in his
wanderings. And when they did so, some turned to gaze on him with a look
of prying curiosity, others laughed and called to their companions--and
the indignation of Ebenezer was excited, and the frown grew black upon
his face.

He was wandering in a wood in the glen, visiting his favourite
wild-flowers (for he had many that he visited daily, and each was
familiar to him as the face of man to man--he rejoiced when they budded,
blossomed, and laughed in their summer joy, and he grieved when they
withered and died away), when a scream of distress burst upon his ear.
His faithful mastiff started, and answered to the sound. He hurried from
the wood to whence the sound proceeded as rapidly as his lameness would
admit. The mastiff followed by his side, and, by its signs of
impatience, seemed eager to increase its speed, though it would not
forsake him. The cries of distress continued, and became louder. On
emerging from the wood, he perceived a young lady rushing wildly towards
it, and behind her, within ten yards, followed an infuriated bull. A few
moments more, and she must have fallen its victim. With an eager howl,
the dog sprang from the side of its master, and stood between the lady
and her pursuer. Ebenezer forgot his lameness and the feebleness of his
frame, and he hastened at his utmost speed to the rescue of a human
being. Even at that moment a glow of delight passed through his heart,
that the despised <DW36> would save the life of a fellow-mortal--of one
of the race that shunned him. Ere he approached, the lady had fallen,
exhausted and in terror, on the ground. The mastiff kept the enraged
animal at bay, and, with a strength such as he had never before
exhibited, Ebenezer raised the lady in his arms, and bore her to the
wood. He placed her against a tree: the stream passed by within a few
yards, and he brought water in the palms of his hands, and knelt over
her, to bathe her temples and her fair brow. Her brow was indeed fair,
and her face beautiful beyond all that he had looked upon. Her golden
hair in wavy ringlets fell upon her shoulders--but her deep blue eyes
were closed. Her years did not appear to be more than twenty.

"Beautiful!--beautiful!" exclaimed the <DW36>, as he dropped the water
on her face, and gazed on it as he spoke--"it is wondrous beautiful! But
she will open her eyes--she will turn from me as doth her race!--as from
the animal that pursued her!--yet, sure she is beautiful!" and again, as
he spoke, Ebenezer sighed.

The fair being recovered--she raised her eyes--she gazed on his face,
and turned not away from it. She expressed no false horror on beholding
his countenance--no affected revulsion at the sight of his deformity;
but she looked upon him with gratitude--she thanked him with tears. The
<DW36> started--his heart burned. To be gazed on with kindness, to be
thanked, and with tears, and by one so fair, so young, so beautiful, was
to him so strange, so new, he half doubted the reality of the scene
before him. Before the kindness and gratitude that beamed from her eyes,
the misanthropy that had frozen up his bosom began to dissolve, and the
gloom on his features died away, as a vapour before the face of the
morning sun. New thoughts fired his imagination--new feelings transfixed
his heart. Her smile fell like a sunbeam on his soul, where light had
never before dawned; her accents of gratitude, from the moment they were
delivered, became the music of his memory. He found an object on the
earth that he could love--or shall we say that he _did_ love; for he
felt as though already her existence were mysteriously linked to his. We
are no believers in what is termed _love at first sight_. Some
romance-writers hold it up as an established doctrine, and love-sick
boys and moping girls will make oath to the creed. But there never was
love at first sight that a week's perseverance could not wear away. It
holds no intercourse with the heart, but is a mere _fancy_ of the eye;
as a man would fancy a horse, a house, or a picture, which he desires to
purchase. Love is not the offspring of an hour or a day, nor is it the
_ignis fatuus_ which plays about the brain, and disturbs the sleep of
the youth and the maiden in their teens. It slowly steals and dawns upon
the heart, as day imperceptibly creeps over the earth, first with the
tinged cloud--the grey and the clearer dawn--the approaching, the
rising, and the risen sun--blending into each other a brighter and a
brighter shade; but each indistinguishable in their progress and
blending, as the motion of the pointers on a watch, which move
unobserved as time flies, and we mark not the silent progress of light
till it envelop us in its majesty. Such is the progress of pure, holy,
and enduring love. It springs not from mere sight, but its radiance
grows with esteem; it is the whisper of sympathy, unity of feeling, and
mutual reverence, which increases with a knowledge of each other, until
but one pulse seems to throb in two bosoms. The feelings which now
swelled in the bosom of Ebenezer Baird were not the true and only love
which springs from esteem, but they were akin to it. For though the
beauty of the fair being he had rescued had struck his eye, it was not
her beauty that melted the misanthropy of his heart, but the tear of
gratitude, the voice of thanks, the glance that turned not away from
him, the smile--the first that woman had bestowed on him--that entered
his soul. They came from the heart, and they spoke to the heart.

She informed him that her name was Maria Bradbury, and that she was one
of the party then on a visit to the gentleman in his neighbourhood. He
offered to accompany her to the house, and she accepted his offer. But
it was necessary to pass near the spot where he had rescued her from the
fury of the enraged bull. As they drew towards the side of the wood,
they perceived that the bull was gone, but the noble mastiff, the
friend, companion, and defender of the <DW36>, lay dead before them.
Ebenezer wrung his hands, he mourned over his faithful guardian.

"Friend! poor Friend!" he cried (the name of the mastiff was Friend),
"hast thou, too, left me? Thou, of all the things that lived, alone
didst love thy master! Pardon me, lady, pardon an outcast; but until
this hour I have never experienced friendship from man nor kindness from
woman. The human race have treated me as a thing that belonged not to
the same family with themselves; they have persecuted or mocked me, and
I have hated them. Start not--hatred is an alien to my soul--it was not
born there, it was forced upon it--but I hate not you--no! no! You have
spoken kindly to me, you have smiled on me!--the despised, the disowned
Ebenezer will remember you. That poor dog alone, of all living things,
showed affection for me. But he died in a good cause! Poor Friend! poor
Friend!--where shall I find a companion now?" and the tears of the
<DW36> ran down his cheeks as he spoke.

Maria wept also, partly for the fate of the noble animal that had died
in her deliverance, and partly from the sorrow of her companion; for
there is a sympathy in tears.

"Ha! you weep!" cried the <DW36>; "you weep for poor Friend and for me.
Bless thee--bless thee, fair one! they are the first that were ever shed
for my sake! I thought there was not a tear on earth for me."

He accompanied her to the lodge of the mansion where she was then
residing, and there he left her, though she invited him to accompany
her, that he might also receive the congratulations of her friends.

She related to them her deliverance. "Ha! little Ebenezer turned a
hero!" cried one; "Ebenezer the <DW36> become a knight-errant!" said
another. But they resolved to visit him in a body, and return him their
thanks.

But the soul of the deformed was now changed, and his countenance,
though still melancholy, had lost its asperity. His days became a dream,
his existence a wish. For the first time he entertained the hope of
happiness; it was vain, romantic, perhaps we might say absurd, but he
cherished it.

Maria spoke much of the courage, the humanity, the seeming loneliness,
and the knowledge of the deformed, to her friends; and their
entertainer, with his entire party of visiters, with but one exception,
a few days afterwards, proceeded to the cottage of Ebenezer, to thank
him for his intrepidity. The exception we have alluded to was a Lady
Helen Dorrington, a woman of a proud and haughty temper, and whose
personal attractions, if