"That," exclaimed Norton, with a savage laugh over his dying antagonist, "it will cost him some trouble to prove!"
The murderer, in the name of a child which his daughter had borne to Sir John, had the hardihood to enter legal proceedings to obtain the estate.
Henry applied to the parish of Glencleugh for the register of his mother's marriage; but no such record was found. Old Dugald Mackay had a dreamy recollection of such a marriage taking place; but he said—"It pe very strange that it isna in te pook; hur canna swear to it."
Many thought that the day would be given against Henry, and pitied him; but before judgment was pronounced in the case, young Norton was found guilty of forgery, and condemned to undergo the just severity of the law. Previous to his ignominious death, in the presence of witnesses, he confessed the injury he had done to Henry by tearing the leaves from the parish register, and directed where they might be found. They were found—old Norton fled from the country, and Henry obtained undisputed possession of the estate; but on his father's widow and child he settled a competency.
Laird Howison's sorrow moderated as his years increased; and when Henry and Helen had children, and when they had grown up to run about, he requested that they should be sent to him every year, to pull the primroses around Primrose Hall; and they were sent. One of them, a girl, the image of her mother, he often wept over, and said, he hoped to live to love her, as he had loved her mother. Willie Galloway often visited his friends in Cheshire, and remained "canny Willie" to the end of the chapter.
THE BRIDE OF BRAMBLEHAUGH.[1]
It has been stated by the greatest critics the world ever saw—whose names we would mention, if we did not wish to avoid interfering with the simplicity of our humble annals—that no fictitious character ought to be made at once virtuous and unfortunate; and the reason given for it is that mankind, having a natural tendency to a belief of an adjustment, even in this world, of the claims of virtue and the deserts of vice, are displeased with a representation which at once overturns this belief, and creates dissatisfaction with the ways of Providence. This may be very good criticism, and we have no wish to find fault with it as applied to works intended to produce a certain effect on the minds of readers; but, so long as Nature and Providence work with machinery whose secret springs are hid from our view, and evince—doubtless for wise purposes—a disregard of the adjustment of rewards and punishments for virtue and vice, we shall not want a higher authority than critics for exhibiting things as they are, and portraying on the page of truth, wet with unavailing tears, goodness that went to the grave, not only unrewarded, but struck down with griefs that should have dried the heart and grizzled the hairs of the wicked.
In a little haugh that runs parallel to the Tweed—at a part of its course not far from Peebles, and through which there creeps, over a bed of white pebbles, a little burn, whose voice is so small, except at certain places where a larger stone raises its "sweet anger" to the height of a tiny