So Lady Rohallion learned to love the child, and the child to love her with a regard that was quite filial; and his pretty prattle in broken English was her chief solace and amusement after the hours of attendance and _surveillance_ she daily bestowed, like a good housewife and chatelaine of old, upon her household and her husband's tenantry; for there was not "a fishwife's bairn" in the hamlet below could be pilled or powdered for the measles or hooping-cough, without a due consultation being first held with my lady in the castle. Sensation novels were then unknown, and Walter Scott was still in futurity, save as a translator of German ballads. Our respectable old friends, "Tom Jones," "Roderick Random," and "Peregrine Pickle," were still in the flush of their fame; but Lady Rohallion preferred the works of Mr. Richardson, and deemed the sorrows of Clarissa Harlowe, and of Fielding's "Amelia," to be sorrows indeed. Being Winifred Maxwell of the gallant but attainted House of Nithsdale, her Jacobite sympathies were keen and intense; thus, ten years before the date of our story she suffered a real grief, and had worn a suit of the deepest black, on tidings coming from Maybole that Prince Charles Edward, with whom her mother had flirted in Holyrood, and for whom her uncles had shed their blood on the fatal field of Culloden--that the Bonnie Prince Charlie of so many stirring memories, so many Scottish songs, and so many faithful hearts, an old, soured, and disappointed man, had been gathered to his fathers, and was lying cold and dead in his tomb, beneath the dome of St. Peter. Though she had somewhat strong ideas on the subject of keeping up "the old spirit of the Crawfords of Rohallion," a good deal of which, we are sorry to say, meant looking down on their neighbours: and though she had an intense estimation for people of "that ilk," and for coats, quarterings, and family claims, and that kind of blood which the Scots designated as _gude_, and the Spaniards as _blue_, she was weak enough, as Lady Eglinton phrased it, to treasure immensely a copy of very flattering verses, addressed to her in her beauty and girlhood, by a certain democratic Ayrshire ploughman, named Mr. Robert Burns, for whose memory she had a very great regard. She was full of the proud and fiery ideas of a past and manly age, for she was old enough to remember when the beaus and bloods of Edinburgh in their periwigs and square-skirted coats of silk or velvet, squired her and Eleanora Eglinton up the old Assembly Close, with links flaring and swords flashing round their sedans, swearing, with such large oaths as were then fashionable, to whip through the lungs any scurvy fellow who loitered an instant in their way. But the first years of the present century saw a new world closing round her, and innovations coming fast, though the old language in which our laws are written yet lingered in the pulpit and at the bar.