In the long nights of winter I saved up my candles--no easy task in the house of a miser like Nathan Wylie--and, retreating to my attic, read far into the hours of morning; poring over such novels and romances as were lent me by the village milliner, a somewhat romantic old maiden, who had been jilted by a recruiting officer, and for whose memory she always shed a scanty tear, for he fell at the bombardment of Carthagena. These books I read by stealth, such literature being deemed trash and dangerous profanity in the godly mansion of Nathan Wylie. Then when the wind, that tore down the rocky ravines of the Cheviots, howled in the chimneys, or shook the rafters above me, I loved to fancy myself at sea, for the life of a sailor seemed to embody all my ideas of perfect freedom--a bold buccaneer, like Sir Henry Morgan--a voyager, like Drake or Dampier--a conqueror, like Hawke or Boscawen--a wanderer, like dear old Robinson Crusoe, or worthy Philip Quarll; and then I went to sleep and to dream of foreign lands, of lovely isles full of strange trees and wondrous flowers, where scaly serpents crawled, and spotted tigers lurked; of cities that were all bannered towers, gilded cupolas and marble temples, glittering in the sunshine far beyond the sea. A lonely child, I ripened into a lonely lad, and so passed my life, until the coming of Ruth Wylie, an event which fully deserves a chapter to itself. CHAPTER II. RUTH WYLIE. Love occasioned my first scrape in life, and thus it came to pass. About the period of my aimless existence, detailed in the last chapter, the mansion of Mr. Nathan Wylie received a new, and to him, in no way welcome inmate, in the person of an orphan niece from London, the daughter of a brother who had died in circumstances the reverse of affluent, bequeathing this daughter--then in her sixteenth year--to his care. This brother's letter--one penned on his death-bed in an agony of anxiety for the _future_ of his orphan Ruth--was deeply touching in its simple tenor; and some of the references therein to years that had long passed away, and to the pleasant days of their boyhood, should have been more than enough to soften even the heart of Nathan Wylie; but he read it unmoved, with a grimace on his thin mouth and his beetle brows knit. Then he carefully folded and docketed it among others, with a gleam of irritation in his cat-like eyes; and equally unmoved by sympathy or compassion did he receive his charge, when she arrived by the stagecoach from London, pale with sorrow, weary with travel, and clad in cheap and simple mourning for the father she had lost.