The old property of Eyrymount—belonging to a sept of the Græmes that had at a former period emigrated to that locality, not far from the Borders of Scotland, and possessed, at the time we speak of, by Hugo Græme, a man somewhat advanced in years—was (for it has latterly been broken down into small portions) one of the finest small possessions of a commoner that could be seen in the fairest part of Scotland. Compact, and divided into two portions—one of the richest arable soil, and another, where the mansion-house stood, of planted ground, adorned by green trees and flowering shrubs—it was just that kind of property which, filling the purse and pleasing the eye, a man of sense and a lover of nature would choose to occupy and draw the rents of. The proprietor of this fine retreat—Hugo, of the fourth generation of these Græmes—was the very worst kind of man that could have been placed upon such an estate; for he held that kind of middle station between the exclusive great and the not exclusive, which, producing discontentment with what is in one’s power, and generating an ambition seldom realized, neutralizes all the advantages of independence, and changes the gifts of Providence into gilded evils. The property was too small to enable him to cope with those whom he wished to associate with, while it was too extensive to admit of its proprietor being classed with many of the neighbouring lairds. Yet his pride struggled with the physical impossibilities with which the limited nature of Eyrymount surrounded him; and his life for many years had been occupied by a series of efforts to make up, by art and diplomacy, what could not be wrung from his patrimonial inheritance. His wife, Madam Græme—as she was styled by the neighbours, from her possession of a pride equal to, if not transcending that of her husband—was the daughter of a rich banker, who, after her marriage, lost his wealth, and, of course, the charm which procured for him the enviable title of father-in-law to Hugo Græme of Eyrymount, the fourth lineal heir of the southern sept of the Græmes. The pride which had been generated in the bosom of the young lady by expectation, was not relinquished with her hope of succeeding to a fortune that had taken to itself “the wings of the morning.” Bringing in this way no riches to her husband, she did not leave behind her the evils which generally attend them and often survive them; and the hundred thousand pounds she expected to succeed to, though now in the pockets of other people, and feeding a pride of a more legitimate kind in the bosoms of the possessors, founded that kind of claim to honour which a ragged heir of a thousand acres which have been out of his family for fifty years, thinks he has a right to assume, from the mere circumstance of his grandfather having been the laird. The pride of the master and mistress of Eyrymount, strong in the original stems, was strengthened, but not, like the forest crab-apple, improved,