When he had said this, he wiped his eyes hastily and impatiently with the lap of his plaid, seized his old pike-staff; and as he tottered across the floor, drawing up his plaid around his waist, its purple rustic colours caught his eye, dim as it was; and he perceived that it was not his tartan one with the gaudy spangles, but the grey marled one that was made to him by his beloved daughter. Who can trace the links of association in the human mind? The chain is more angled, more oblique, than the course marked out by the bolt of heaven--as momentarily formed, and as quickly lost. In all cases, they are indefinable, but on the mind of old age, they glance like dreams and visions of something that have been, and are for ever gone. The instant that Isaac's eye fell on his mantle, he looked hastily and involuntarily around him, first on the one side and then on the other, his visage manifesting trepidation and uncertainty. "Pray what have you lost, sir?" said the kind and officious dame. "I cannot tell what it was that I missed," said old Isaac, "but methought I felt as if I had left something behind me that was mine." Isaac went away, but left not a dry eye in the dwelling which he quitted. On leaving the cottage he was accompanied part of the way by Gawin, in whose manner there still remained an unaccountable degree of embarrassment. His conversation laboured under a certain restraint, insomuch that Isaac, who was an observer of human nature, could not help taking notice of it; but those who have never witnessed, in the same predicament, a home-bred, honest countryman, accustomed to speak his thoughts freely at all times, can form no conception of the appearance that Gawin made. From the time that the worthy old man first entered his cot, till the time they parted again on the height, Gawin's lips were curled, the one up, and the other down, leaving an inordinate extent of teeth and gums displayed between them; whenever his eyes met those of his companion, they were that instant withdrawn, and, with an involuntary motion, fixed on the summit of some of the adjacent hills; and when they stopped to converse, Gawin was always laying on the ground with his staff, or beating some unfortunate thistle all to pieces. The one family had suffered an injury from the other, of a nature so flagrant in Gawin's eyes, that his honest heart could not brook it; and yet so delicate was the subject, that when he essayed to mention it, his tongue refused the office. "There has a sair misfortune happened," said he once, "that ye aiblins dinna ken o'.--But it's nae matter ava!" And with that he fell on and beat a thistle, or some other opposing shrub, most unmercifully.