Isabel Rose, the gudewife of Minitarf, was a native of Easter-Ross, and having lost both her parents in infancy, she had passed some of the earlier years of her life with a married sister in the town of Cromarty. She had been famed for her beauty, and for being the toast of three parishes; and of all her lovers, and few could reckon up more, she had been lucky enough to lose her heart to one of the best. The favoured suitor was a handsome young farmer of the province of Moray--a person somewhat less shrewd, perhaps, than many of his countrymen, but inflexibly honest, and perseveringly industrious; and, as he was a namesake of her own, she became his wife and the mistress of Minitarf, and yet remained Isabel Rose as before. The wife became a mother--the mother of two boys. Years passed by; the little drama of her life, like one of the dramas of antiquity, had scarce any change of circumstance, and no shifting of scenes; and her two sons grew up to maturity, as unlike one another in character as if they had not been born to the same parents, nor brought up under the same roof. John, the elder son, was cautious and sensible, and of great kindliness of disposition. There was nothing bright or striking about him; but he united to his father’s integrity and firmness of purpose much more than his father’s shrewdness, and there was a homely massiveness in the character that procured him respect. He was of a mechanical turn; and making choice of the profession of a house-carpenter--for he was as little ambitious as may be--he removed to Glasgow, where his steadiness and skill recommended him to the various contractors of the place, until in the course of years he became, a good deal to his own surprise, a contractor himself. Sandy, the younger son, was volatile and unsettled, and impatient of labour and restraint, and yet no piece of good fortune could have surprised Sandy. He had somehow come to the conclusion that he was born to be a gentleman, and took rank accordingly, by being as little useful, and dressing as showily as he could. His principles were of a more conventional cast than those of his brother, and his heart less warm; still, however, there was no positive vice in the character; and as he was decidedly cleverer than John, and a great deal more genteel, his mother could not help sharing with him in the hope that he was born to be the gentleman of the family--a hope which, of course, was not lessened when she saw him bound apprentice in his seventeenth year to a draper in a neighbouring town.