Will Mather was about two years older than Nancy--a fine youth, attending the same school, and evidently an admirer of Nancy. Mine was the love of comparative boyhood; but his was a passion gradually ripening (as the charms of Nancy budded into womanhood) into a manly and matrimonial feeling. I loved the girl merely as such--his eye, his heart, his whole soul were in his future bride. Marriage in no shape ever entered into my computations; but his eager look and heaving bosom bespoke the definite purpose--he anticipated felicity. I don't know exactly why, but I was never jealous of Will Mather--we were companions; and he was high-souled and generous, and stood my friend in many perilous quarrels. I knew that _my_ pathway in life was to be afar from that in which Nancy and Will were likely to walk; and I felt in my heart that, dear as this beautiful rosebud was to me, I was not _man_ enough--I was not _peasant_ enough to wear it in my bosom. Had Nancy on any occasion turned round to be kissed by me, I would have fled over muir and dale, to avoid her presence--and yet I had often a great desire to obtain that favour. Once indeed, and only once, did I obtain, or rather steal it. She was sitting beside a bird's nest, the young ones of which she was feeding and cherishing--for the parent birds, by the rapacity of a cat, had recently perished. As the little bills were expanding to receive their food, her countenance beamed with pity and benevolence. I never saw even _her_ so lovely--so, in a moment, I had her round the neck, and clung to her lips with the tenacity of a creature drowning. But, feeling at once the awkwardness of my position, I took to my heels, becoming immediately invisible amidst the surrounding brushwood. Such was "Will Mather," and such was "Nancy Morrison" at the period of which I am speaking. We must now advance about two or three years in our chronology, and find Will possessed of a piece of information which bore materially on his future fortunes. Will was an illegitimate child. His mother had kept the secret so well that he did not know his father, though he had frequently urged her to reveal to him privately all that she knew of his parentage. In conversing, too, with Nancy, his now affianced bride, he had expressed similar wishes; whilst she, with a becoming and feminine modesty, had urged him not to press an aged parent on so delicate a point. At last the old woman was taken seriously ill, and, on her death-bed and at midnight, revealed to her son the secret of his birth. He was the son of a proprietor in the parish, and a much-respected man. The youth, so soon as he had closed his mother's eyes, hurried off, amidst the darkness, to the abode of his father, and, entering by a window, was in his father's bedchamber and over his body ere he was fully awake. "John Scott!" said the son, in a firm and terrible tone, grasping his parent meantime convulsively round the neck--"John Scott of Auchincleuch, _I am thy son_!"