“This is the first east wind we’ve had for a fortnight,” said Marjory. “I think we have very little reason to complain.” “Ye see I’m frae the south,” said the woman; “and my man has a hoast that drives ye wild to hear; and when we havena the east wind in Comlie we have the rain, and the bairns canna gang to the school, and there’s naething but dirt and wet, and misery and quarrelling. It’s a weary world, as our grannie says. Whatever the Almighty sends, there’s aye something folk would like better.” “But perhaps that might be the folk’s fault, and not the Almighty’s,” suggested Marjory. “Maybe; I’m no saying,” answered Mary Baxter, cautiously. “I hope’s a’ weel at Pitcomlie, and good news o’ the young gentlemen. They tell me Mr. Charles’s wife out in India yonder, has another son. Bless us! and I mind himself so well, a curly-headed laddie! It would have been mair like the thing if Mr. Tammas would settle down, and bring hame some bonnie young leddy and gie Mr. Heriot childhers’ childher, as it’s in the Bible. But there’s nae word o’ that that I can hear?” “No, there is no word of that. I hope Nancy is doing well in her new place,” said Miss Heriot, changing the subject with the same unconscious artifice which had prompted her humble interlocutor to carry the war into the enemy’s country by introducing Charles’s marriage and Tom’s bacherlorhood. These two subjects were not pleasing to the house of Heriot; for Tom, the heir, unfortunately, showed no inclination to marry at all, and Charlie in India had become a husband and a father much too soon, contrary to all traditions. Marjory passed on when she had been satisfied on the subject of Nancy, but was stopped a few steps further on by a bareheaded girl in a pretty pink short-gown, the costume of the country, who ran after her with her fair locks falling loose in the wind. “Eh, Miss Marjory, would you come in and speak to my mither?” cried this new applicant. This was Jenny Patterson, who lived up a stair just behind the Tolbooth, and a little out of Miss Heriot’s way. How Jenny admired the young lady as she gathered up her heavy cloth skirts, and with a smile and a nod went on to the well-known door! If Jenny had ever heard of goddesses, just so would she have impersonified a feminine divinity; that mixture of splendid superiority and familiar kindness being of all things the most captivating to the unsophisticated soul. Jenny’s brother, who was a watchmaker in Dundee, and held very advanced political opinions, considered her devotion servile, but blushed to feel that he himself shared it whenever he was brought under the same influence. “But it’s no the leddy, it’s the woman I think of,” Radical Jock explained to himself--an explanation as false as most such explanations are.