There is a Cottage in that hollow, and you see the smoke--even the chimney-top, but you could not see the Cottage itself, unless you were within fifty yards of it, so surrounded is it with knolls and small green eminences, in a den of its own, a shoot or scion from the main stem of the valley. It is called THE BROOM, and there is something singular, and not uninteresting, in the history of its owner. He married very early in life, indeed when quite a boy, which is not, by the way, very unusual among the peasantry of Scotland, prudent and calculating as is their general character. David Drysdale, before he was thirty years of age, had a family of seven children, and a pretty family they were as might be seen in all the parish. His life was in theirs, and his mind never wandered far from his fireside. His wife was of a consumptive family, and that insidious and fatal disease never showed in her a single symptom during ten years of marriage; but one cold evening awoke it at her very heart, and in less than two months it hurried her into the grave. Poor creature, such a spectre! When her husband used to carry her, for the sake of a little temporary relief, from chair to couch, and from her couch back again to her bed, twenty times in a day, he hardly could help weeping, with all his consideration, to feel her frame as light as a bundle of leaves. The medical man said, that in all his practice he never had known soul and body keep together in such utter attenuation. But her soul was as clear as ever while racking pain was in her fleshless bones. Even he, her loving husband, was relieved from woe when she expired; for no sadness, no sorrow, could be equal to the misery of groans from one so patient and so resigned. Perhaps consumption is infectious--so, at least, it seemed here; for first one child began to droop, and then another--the elder ones first; and, within the two following years, there were almost as many funerals from this one house as from all the others in the parish. Yes--they all died--of the whole family not one was spared. Two, indeed, were thought to have pined away in a sort of fearful foreboding--and a fever took off a third--but four certainly died of the same hereditary complaint with the mother; and now not a voice was heard in the house. He did not desert the Broom; and the farm-work was still carried on, nobody could tell how. The servants, to be sure, knew their duty, and often performed it without orders. Sometimes the master put his hand to the plough, but oftener he led the life of a shepherd, and was by himself among the hills. He never smiled--and at every meal he still sat like a man about to be led out to die. But what will not retire away--recede--disappear from the vision of the souls of us mortals! Tenacious as we are of our griefs, even more than of our joys, both elude our grasp. We gaze after them with longing or self-upbraiding aspirations for their return; but they are shadows, and like shadows vanish.