One night in midsummer, a long, long time ago--so long ago that I may not venture to assign the date--the moon shone down, as it might have done last night, over the wild, lone shore of Loch Dochart. Upon a little promontory on its southern margin stood a girl, meanly clad, wasted, and wayworn. In her arms she bore a little babe, wrapped up in the folds of a plaid; and as she bent her thin, pallid face over that of the child, her rich, long, yellow hair fell in a shower around her, unconfined either by _snood_ or _curch_. One might have taken her for Magdalene, in her withered beauty, her penitence, and her grief; but other than Magdalene, in her passionate despair. She looked around her, and a shudder shook her feeble frame. Was it the chill of the night mist?--it might be; for as her eye wandered away toward the hills beyond, northward, the mists were creeping along their sides, and she saw the moonlight gleaming on a lowly cot, amid a fir grove. 'Twas the home of her parents, the home of her happy childhood, her innocent youth. She looked again at the little one in her bosom; it slept, but a spasm of pain wrung its pale, pinched, sharp features. It appeared to be feeble and pining, for sleepless nights and days of grief and tears had turned the milk of the mother to gall and poison, and the little innocent drank in death--death, the fruit of sin in all climes and ages. Gently she laid the little one by the margent of the water, amid the green rushes; and the breeze of night sweeping by murmured plaintively to them, and caused them to sigh, and rock to and fro around the infant. Then the poor mother withdrew a space from the babe, and sat her down upon a white stone, and covered her face with her long, thin, bloodless hands. She said in her heart, as Hagar said, "Let me not see the death of the child." And she wept sore, for the poor girl loved the babe, as a mother, like her, only can love her babe, with a wild, passionate, absorbing love, for it is her all, her pearl of great price, which she has bought with name and fame, with home and friends, with health and happiness, with earth, and, it may be, with heaven. And she thought bitterly over that happy home, where, a few months since, in the gloaming of the autumn's eve, she sat on the heathery braes, and tripped along the brink of the warbling burn, or milked the kine in the byre, or sang to her spinning-wheel beside her mother, near the ingle. Next came the recollection of one who sat beside her in the braes, and strayed with her down the burn; who won her heart with his false words, and drew her from the holy shelter of her father's roof, to leave her in her desolation among the southern strangers. And now, with the faithfulness--though not with the purity or trustfulness--of the dove, she was returning over the waste of the world's dark waters to that ark which had sheltered her early years--from which no father had sent her forth.