By the peculiarities of his person, as well as by the other abject circumstances of his condition, it may be easily supposed that the Hermit of Manor was entirely excluded from that great solace of the miseries of man, the sympathy to be derived from the tenderness and affections of woman. He was irredeemably condemned, as it were, to a dreary bachelorhood of the heart, which knew that there was for it no hope, no possibility of enjoyment. Perhaps the constant sense of loathsomeness in the eyes of the fair part of creation might help to increase the natural wretchedness of his existence. The misanthropy of Elshender is pathetically represented in the tale as springing chiefly from sources of disappointment like this. It happens, also, that his humble prototype once ventured to express the sensibilities of the common delirium of man, and that he was rejected by the object of his affection. This insult, though it sprung from a very natural feeling on the part of the woman, sunk deep into his heart; and thus was he debarred from what would have been the only means of sweetening the bitter lot of solitary poverty and decrepitude,—dashed back with scorn from the general draught at which even his inferiors were liberally indulged. This circumstance forms another trait of resemblance between the Black Dwarf and David Ritchie; and, by a happy consonance never before discovered, confirms their identity. “His habits were, in many respects, singular, and indicated a mind sufficiently congenial with its uncouth tabernacle. A jealous, misanthropical, and irritable temper was his most prominent characteristic. The sense of his deformity haunted him like a phantom; and the insults and scorn to which this exposed him had poisoned his heart with fierce and bitter feelings, which, from other traits in his character, do not appear to have been more largely infused into his original temperament than that of his fellow-men. He detested children, on account of their propensity to insult and persecute him. To strangers he was generally reserved, crabbed, and surly; and even towards persons who had been his greatest benefactors, and who possessed the greatest share of his good-will, he frequently betrayed much caprice and jealousy. A lady, who knew him from his infancy, says, that, although he showed as much attachment and respect for her father’s family as it was in his nature to show for any, yet they were always obliged to be very cautious in their deportment towards him. One day, having gone to visit him with another lady, he took them through his garden, and was showing them, with much pride and good-humour, all his rich and tastefully assorted borders, here picking up with his long staff some insidious weed, and there turning to digress into the history of some mysterious exotic, when they happened to stop near a plot of cabbages, which had been somewhat injured by the caterpillars. Davie, observing one of the ladies smile, instantly assumed a savage