Within about five years of the death of the husband and father, old Hayston died, and left Whitecraigs to his only son, Hector, who was kind enough to continue the gift of the father to the inmates of Homestead; but he loaded them with a condition, unspoken, yet implied. The young laird and the pretty cottage maiden had foregathered often amidst the romantic scenes on the Lyne; and that which Nature probably intended as a guard and a mean of segregation--the shrinking timidity of her own mountain child, when looked upon by the eye of, to her, aristocracy--only tended to an opposite effect. A poet has compared love to an Eastern bird, which loses all its beauty when it flies, and it is as true as it is a pretty conceit; but if there was any feathered creature whose wings, reflecting, from its monaul tints, the sun in greater splendour, when on the wing, it would supply as applicable and not less poetical an emblem of the object of the little god's heart-stirrings; and so it seemed to the young laird of Whitecraigs, that, as Alice Scott bounded away over the green hills, or down by the Lyne banks, at his approach, her flight added to the interest which she had already inspired when she had no means of escape. But, as the wildest doe may be caught and tamed, so was she, who was as a white one removed from the herd. The young man possessed attractions beside those of imputed wealth and station; and probably, though we mean not to be severe upon the sex, the process by which his affection had been increased was reversed in its effects upon her, to whom assiduous seeking was as the assiduous retreating had been to him. Yet all was, we believe, honourable in the intentions of young Hayston; and, as for Alice, she was in the primeval condition of a total unconsciousness of evil. The "one blossom on earth's tree," as the poet has it, was by her yet unplucked, nor knew she how many thousands have had cause to sing-- "I have plucked the one blossom that hangs on earth's tree; I have lived--I have loved, and die."