"Where am I?—Harry!"
"Here I am, dear Tom!"
"Oh! I have had such a dream!" His eye-glance fell upon the tomb.—"Merciful Heaven! is it true?" And leaning his head upon my breast, while his face turned deadly pale, he gasped for breath. At length, a burst of sorrow, such as I had seldom witnessed, relieved his over-wrought feelings; he sobbed and wept as if his heart were flowing out of him. I did not attempt to check or to console him; sorrow like his was, in its first bitterness, too deep and withering for consolation. Alas! I needed comfort for myself!
At length, the first violence of his feelings was exhausted, and he suffered me to lead him, unresistingly, to the manse, where we were received with the greatest kindness and sympathy by the sorrowing family. There we heard the sad particulars of our loss. Kate had fallen a victim to consumption some months before; the letter containing the melancholy news had not reached us. Poor Tom, exhausted by previous illness, and overcome by the dreadful shock he had experienced, was obliged to take to his bed. I hastened back to my ship, where I was detained some weeks. When I returned, Tom was dying. He knew me; and with a faint smile, and a hardly perceptible pressure of my hand, he murmured—
"I die happy, Harry. She prayed for me on her death-bed!"
THE COTTAR'S DAUGHTER.
The parties to whom the following tale refers being still, we believe, alive, we must warn the reader that, though the story be true, the names employed are fictitious; but we beg also to add, that in this circumstance alone is the tale indebted to invention.
Young Edington of Wellwood was the son of a gentleman of large fortune, residing in Roxburghshire; but we shall not say in what particular part of that district. The noble residence of Wellwood—a huge castellated pile, rising in the midst of embowering woods and wide-spread lawns of the smoothest and brightest verdure—sufficiently bespoke the wealth of its owner; or, if this was not enough to give such assurance, the crowd of liveried menials that might be seen lounging about its magnificent portals, together with the splendid equipages that were ever and anon rolling to and from the lordly mansion, would have carried this conviction to the mind of the most casual observer.
The presumptive heir to all this grandeur was young Wellwood, who was an only child. At the period of our story, Harry (for such was his Christian name) was about four-and-twenty years of age. His education had been completed at Oxford some three years previous to this; and the interval had been spent in a tour on the Continent, from which he had now just returned, to reside some time with his father, before going abroad, to fill a high official situation, which the latter's great influence in the political world had procured for him.