in love. There was a pretty, simple lassie, the daughter of one of the bailies of the place, whom I used frequently to meet with in our evening parties, and with whose appearance I was mightily taken from the moment I first saw her. She united, in a rare degree, all the elegance of the young lady with all the simplicity of the child; and, with better sense than falls to the share of nineteen-twentieths of her sex, was more devoid than any one I ever knew of their characteristic cunning. You have heard, I daresay, that young ladies are anxious about getting husbands; but, trust me, it is all a mistake. The anxiety is too natural a one to be experienced by so artificial a personage as the mere young lady. It is not persons but things she longs after—settlements, not sweethearts. I have had a hundred young-lady friends, who liked my youth and gentility, and who used to dance, and romp, and chat with me, with all the good-will possible, but who thought as little of me as a sweetheart as if I were one of themselves. Thoughts of that tender class were to be reserved for some rich Indian, with a complexion the colour of a drum-head, and a liver like a plum-pudding. This bonny lassie, however, was born—poor thing!—with natural feelings. We met, and learned to like one another; we sang and laughed together; talked of scenery and the belles lettres; and, in short, lost our hearts to one another ere we so much as dreamed that we had hearts to lose. You must be in love, Sandy, ere all I could tell you could give you adequate notions of the happiness I have enjoyed with that bonny, kind-hearted lassie. Love, I have said, taught me diligence. I applied to my profession anew, determined to be a lawyer, and the husband of Catherine. I waded through whole tomes of black-letter statutes, studied my way over forty folios of decisions, and did what I suppose no one ever did before—read Grigor on the Game-laws. Not half-a-dozen practitioners in the country could draw out a deed of settlement with equal adroitness—not one succeeded in putting fewer double meanings into a will. My master used to consult me on conveyancing; and when, at the expiry of my term, I left his office and set up for myself, you will not wonder it was with the hope that my at least average acquirements would secure for me an average portion of success. You will see how that hope was realised.

"The father of my sweetheart was, as I have said, a Inverness bailie; he was extensively engaged in trade, and all deemed him a rising man; but the case was otherwise. An unlucky speculation, and the unexpected failure of a friend, involved him in ruin; and I saw his office shut up not three weeks after I had opened my own. A week after brought me the intelligence of my father's death. He had been sinking in the world for years before; getting, much against his will, into arrears with every one; and now, immediately on his death, all his effects were seized by the laird. He was an easy-tempered, obliging man—credulous and confiding—and hence, perhaps, his misfortunes. You will deem me cold and selfish, Sandy, to speak in this way of my father; and yet, believe me, I felt as a son ought to feel; but repeated blows have a stupefying effect, and I can now tell you, with scarcely a twinge, of hopes blighted and friends lost. All my hopes of rising by my profession soon failed me. No one entered my office. Though not without some confidence in my acquirements, as you may see, I have ever had a sort of shamefaced bashfulness about me, that has done me infinite harm. People were afraid to trust their cases with one who seemed to mistrust himself—the forward, the impudent, and the unprincipled carried off all the employment, and I was left to starve."

"Honest, unlucky chield!" ejaculated Sandy, with a profound yawn. "One might guess, by the way ye bargain wi' the Indians, that ye hae a vast deal owre little brass for makin a fortune by the law. But what cam o' your puir simple lassie, Innes, when her father broke?"

"Ah, dear, good girl," replied Innes, "with all her simplicity, she was, by much, better fitted for making her way through the world than her lover. She was highly accomplished, drew beautifully, read Chateaubriand in the original, and had a pretty taste for music. Through the recommendation of a friend, she was engaged as governess in the family of a Highland proprietor, in which, when I left Scotland, she continued to be employed—well, I trust, for her own happiness—usefully, I am sure, for others. I shall forget many things, Sandy, ere I forget the day I passed with her on the green top of Tomnahurich, ere we parted, as it proved, for ever. You know that beautiful hill—the queen of all our Highland Tomhans—with the long winding canal on the one side, and the brattling Ness on the other, and surrounded by an assemblage of the loveliest hills that ever dressed in purple and blue. It was a beautiful day in early spring, and the sun shone cheerily on a hundred white cottages at our feet, each looking out from its own little thicket of birch and laburnum, and on the distant town, with its smoke-wreath resting over it, and its two old steeples rising through. The world was busy all around us: we could see the ploughman following his team, and the mariner warping onward his vessel; the hum of eager occupation came swelling with the breeze from the far-off streets—and yet there was I, a poor supernumerary among the millions of my countrymen, parting almost broken-hearted from her whom I loved better than myself, just because there was no employment for me. Oh, the agony of that parting! But 'tis passed, Sandy, and 'tis but folly thus to recall it. No one, as I have already told you, ever thought of entering my office—no one, save my landlord and the old woman with whom I lived; and you may believe there was little of comfort in their visits. I was in arrears to the one for rent, and to the other for lodging. So far was I reduced, that, in passing through the old woman's room, I have been fain to take a potato from off her platter, and that single potato has formed my meal for the time. On one occasion I was for two days together without food."

"Goodness gracious!" exclaimed Sandy—"what came o' a' the grand freends that used to gie ye the teas and suppers? Had they nae bowels ava?"

"I would sooner have starved, Sandy, than have made my wants known to the best of them. But there was one on whom I had a nearer claim, to whom I applied in vain—a brother of my father—a close old hunks, who, though he had realised thousands as a ship-broker in London, had not heart enough to part with a shilling for the benefit of his poor nephew. But I believe the wretched man was well-nigh as unkind to himself as he was to me, and, in the midst of his wealth, fared nearly as ill. You are getting sleepy, Sandy, and I daresay 'tis little wonder you should; but I find a melancholy satisfaction in thus retracing the untoward events of the past, which I am certain I could not feel, did conscience whisper that my misfortunes were in any great degree owing to myself. Well, but to conclude. I became squalid and shabby; all the ladies sent me to Coventry, and all the gentlemen spurned me as a fellow of no spirit. I had mistaken my profession, it was said; and blockheads, who had been guiltless of a single new idea all their lives long, used to repeat from one another that my father, in making a wretched lawyer of me, had spoiled a good ploughman. I could bear no longer. The Hudson's Bay Company had an agent, you know, at Inverness. I called on him one evening after a day of fasting and miserable low spirits—and now here I am, in the second year of my service with the company."

"But, how, Innes, man," inquired Sandy, "could ye hae found heart to leave Scotland, without seein the puir lassie, your sweetheart? Do ye ken aught o' her now?"

"Know of her!" exclaimed Innes; "alas! I too surely know I have lost her. The last thing but one that I did ere I sailed from Stromness, was to write her to say how I had fallen from all my