The good woman sat down upon a piece of the loose rock, and commenced a long history of herself, of her husband, and of the great clan of Macdonald (to which they belonged), which at last ended in the discovery, that her aristocratic spouse was a Corporal in the Highland regiment then stationed in Edinburgh, and that Flora, his wife, washed for the officers in the said regiment—that the little Donald, with his wild-goat propensities, was their only child, and so attached to the hills, that she could not keep him confined to the meadows below! The moment her eye was off him, his great delight was to lead her a dance up the mountain, which, as she never succeeded in catching him, was quite labour in vain.
All this, and more, the good-natured woman communicated in her frank, desultory manner, as she led Flora down the steep, narrow path which led to the meadows below. Her kindness did not end here, for she walked some way up the road to put Mrs. Lyndsay in the right track to regain her lodgings, for Flora, trusting to the pilotage of Jim, was perfectly ignorant of the location.
This Highland Samaritan indignantly refused the piece of silver Flora proffered in return for her services. “Hout, leddy! keep the siller! I wudna’ tak’ aught fra’ ye o’ the Sabbath-day for a trifling act o’ courtesy—na, na, I come of too gude bluid for that!”
There was a noble simplicity about the honest-hearted woman, which was not lost upon Flora.
“If I were not English,” thought Flora, “I should like to be Scotch.”
She looked rather crest-fallen, as she presented herself before her Scotch husband, who laughed heartily over her misadventure, and did not cease to tease her about her expedition to the mountain, as long as they remained in its vicinity.
This did not deter her from taking a long stroll on the sands “o’ Leith,” the next afternoon, with James, who delighted in these Quixotish rambles; and was always on the alert, to join in any scheme which promised an adventure. It was a lovely afternoon. The sun glittered on the distant waters, which girdled the golden sands with a zone of blue and silver. The air was fresh and elastic, and diffused a spirit of life and joyousness around. Flora, as she followed the footsteps of her young agile conductor, felt like a child again; and began to collect shells and sea-weeds, with as much zest as she had done along her native coast, in those far-off happy days, which at times returned to her memory like some distinct, but distant dream.
For hours they wandered hither and thither, lulled by the sound of the waters, and amused by their child-like employment; until Flora remarked, that her footprints filled with water at each step, and the full deep roaring of the sea gave notice of the return of the tide. Fortunately they were not very far from the land; and oh, what a race they had to gain the “Peir o’ Leith,” before they were overtaken by the waves. How thankful they felt that they were safe, as the billows chased madly past, over the very ground, which a few minutes before, they had so fearlessly trod.
“This is rather worse than the mountain, mamma Flora,” (a favourite name with James for his friend Mrs. Lyndsay,) “and might have been fatal to us both. I think Mr. Lyndsay would scold this time, if he knew our danger.”
“We won’t quarrel on the score of prudence. But what is this?” said Flora; and she stepped up to a blank wall, on their homeward path, and read aloud the following advertisement:—