By the early death of his parents, Charlie had been cast, in his extreme boyhood, upon the tender mercies of a bachelor uncle, Mr. Gamaliel Balgonie, a hard-hearted, grasping and avaricious merchant in Dundee--one who was a noisy exhibitor of religion, a fervent expounder of crooked texts, and, of course, an Elder of the Kirk; a great quoter of Scripture upon unnecessary occasions; one who always wore garments of sad-coloured broad cloth, with a spotless white cravat, and whose quavering voice and meek but cunning eyes were frequently uplifted against the enormities, the wickedness, and "the temptawtions and tribulawtions of this weary world;" and who was, moreover, a vehement despiser of that which he stigmatized as "its wretched dross," but which he left no means, fair or foul, untried to acquire. In the lovely vale of Strathearn--one of the most exquisite tracts of verdant scenery in Scotland--stood the home of Charlie Balgonie. In his delirium, the present had fled, and the past returned. He had been a boy again at his father's knee--a child with his curly head nestling on his smiling mother's breast; again, in fancy, had her kisses rested on his cheek, and her soft voice lingered lovingly in his ear; again had he felt all that happiness, perfect trust, and security which the boy feels by his father's hearth, and the man, in after life, never more! He heard not the hoarse Louga crashing down its ice-blocks to the Baltic Sea; but the gentle murmur of the Earn, flowing from the wooded hills of Comrie towards the broad blue bosom of the Tay--the Earn, where many a time and oft he had lured the brown trout and the speckled salmon from the deep, dark pools, near the old battle-cross of Dupplin and the Birks of Invermay. Again he had heard the leaves rustle pleasantly in the summer woods, where he had nutted and birdnested when a boy; and he had seen, in a vivid dream, his glorious native valley where it narrows at Dunira; and far beyond, the blue ridges of the mighty Grampians, lifting their summits, alp on alp, to the clouds, eternal and unchanged as when the foiled legions of Julius Agricola fled along their slopes in rout and disorder.