“ Yet, when I think of the mystery of your life, your secresy, the strange way in which you left me last night, to make after the carriage, your admission concerning the ring, and many other circumstances, I must also admit that my heart is not satisfied. I cannot help it. Even my love, unbounded as it is, does not enable me to vanquish a cold feeling that, like the shivering of an ague, creeps over my skin. I cannot say I disbelieve you; but oh, what would I not give for proof to still this restless aching heart!" (Pausing.) "That proof, Mike, I shall have. ”

“ Alfred, I see our danger. My aunt, I fear, is dying. The £20,000 left her by her husband goes to a sordid wretch, his brother, if she dies without a will. There is none on earth she loves but me and Alfred. O beloved Alfred! you alone divide, with that angelic woman, the affection of your Louisa. You are poor; I know it; I have wept for it. I have nothing on this earth. If she die without a will, we are beggars, and her last breath will wail our destiny, and her last tear tell her too late her unavailing sympathy. ”

“ The piercing north wind went whistling in sudden gusts along the frozen surface of the lake, dashing against each other the stiff, brittle branches of the underwood, and shaking off their icicles, or whirling the lighter snow into huge columns, that ever and anon went stalking along the waste like giants, and seemed at times to thrust their foreheads into the very clouds. Not a single human habitation—not so much as the wigwam of an Indian, or aught that could give evidence of even the occasional visits of man—could be seen in the whole frozen circle, from the centre to the horizon. ”

“ The very arrangement of the furniture showed the delicate and nicely-regulated taste of an accomplished female. The shutters were fast barred, there were candles burning on a neat mahogany table, and the cheerful wood-fire glowed through the bars of a grate, and threw up a broad powerful flame, that, in the intense frost, roared in the chimney.
"Ah," said Innes to the manager, "your neat, Scotch-looking parlour brings Scotland to my mind, and my old evening parties; it reminds me, too, that a dress of skins is not quite the fittest for meeting a young lady in. ”

“ But at present I am not writing an essay on speculation or enterprise, but the history of Reuben Purves, the Speculator; and I shall therefore begin with it at once. Reuben was born in Galashiels, than which I do not know a more thriving town, or one more beautifully situated, on all the wide Borders. As you pass it, seated on the outside of the Chevy-Chase coach on a summer day (if perchance a sunny shower shall have fallen) , it lies before you as a long and silvered line, the blue slates reflecting back the sunbeams. In its streets, cleanliness and prosperity join hands ”

“ The girl was in tears, and her feelings choked her reply.
"I feel that you have spoken truth, Alfred," said she; "yet I cannot do it, I cannot—I will rather be a beggar."
"And you will be a beggar, sweet but deluded girl," rejoined the lover; "and Alfred, who would have died for his Louisa, will be also a beggar, through her weakness. Love is hated by the Fates." ”

“ True it is, that as a spirit of speculation or bargain-making contracts itself, and every day becomes more and more a thing of farthings and of fractions, it begets a grovelling spirit of meanness, that may eventually end in dishonesty; but as it expands, it exalts the man, imbues his mind with liberality, and benefits society. The spirit of commercial speculation will spread abroad, until it render useless the sword of the hero, cause it to rust in its scabbard, and to be regarded as the barbarous plaything of antiquity. ”

“ You treat me ill, Mike. What is your love to me, if I am denied your confidence? Yet may I not be asking poison? I could not hear that you were a lawless man, and live a week after I was intrusted with the secret. Unhappy fate, to love, and be forced, by the mysterious conduct of my lover, to suspect his honesty!"
"You are on dangerous ground, Alice," said Maxwell. "We o' the north side o' the Borders say that love has nae suspicions, and that whar there are suspicions, there is nae love. Do ye mean that I should suspect yer love, as ye do my honesty." ”

“ You were, when in Scotland, the victim of a silly prejudice against a humble, but honest calling, but you could have lived in it, notwithstanding, had not a love for wandering drawn you abroad. I, on the contrary—thought like the hare with many friends, I was a favourite with every one—was literally starved out of it. My father was a gentleman farmer, not thirty miles from Inverness, whom the high war prices of cattle and grain had raised from comparative poverty to sudden, though short-lived, affluence. No man could be more sanguine in his hopes for his children. ”

“ There was the great red flames roaring and raging up the height of its five storeys; and the very wheels of the machinery, seen through the windows, glowing as bright as when in the hands of the smith that formed them. The great suffocating clouds of smoke came rolling about me, and even blinding me. Hundreds of women ran about screaming, some carrying water, and some running in the way of others, and drunken men staggered to and fro, like lost spirits in the midst of their tortures. Oh, sir, it was an awful sight for any one to behold ”

“ I laid my hand between his shoulders, and the bedclothes shook with the tremor of his limbs.
"I never can sit more upon this earth," [1] he cried, and then paused and sighed. "My occupation's gone," he continued, in the same trembling, choking voice. "Merciful powers, what is to become of one of my profession, if he cannot sit without a crash? Do I not make my bread sitting? and yet, sir, I put it to you—I put it to you who know the strength of a window pane—how can I sit? how can I ever earn a livelihood for that weeping wife? ”

“ The sea, which had dashed us on our broadside, swept away with it the boats, booms, spars—everything, in fact, from the upper deck; and bore its promiscuous prey onwards towards the beach. What was my agony to see the spar to which Emily was lashed sharing the fate of the rest! She tossed her arms wildly over her head, gave one shrill and piercing scream, and was borne away and hidden from my view by the following sea. "I will save her," I exclaimed, "or perish." ”

“ For God's sake, fly to Giles' house, and see if his hand is hurt. If that is the case, I will believe that Mike Maxwell is an innocent man."
"Why," said Lewie, looking cunningly into her face.
"Because," said she, "Mike Maxwell never would have joined Giles Baldwin, his enemy, in a robbery; and, therefore, the statement made to me at the window was a lie; and one lie, like a fly in a box of ointment, corrupts the whole mass of evidence." ”

“ In short, I became a most accomplished trifler—an effect, perhaps, of my very imperfect love of my profession. The men who rise to eminence, you know, rarely begin their course as fine fellows; and were it not for a circumstance to which I owe more of my happiness and more of my misery than to any other, I would have had to attribute my failure in life less to an untoward destiny than to the dissipation of this period. ”

“ The storm, which had been so long impending, burst out in all its fury, and for some time the two fur-gatherers, impressed by a feeling of natural awe, sat listening to it in silence. The sounds rose and fell by intervals; at times sinking into a deep, sullen roar, when all was comparatively still around; at times swelling into thunder. In a pause of the blast, Sandy rose and flung open the door. ”

“ It was upon one of those clear, chill, but not unpleasant days, that so often occur towards the latter end of November, that an aged female, and one much younger, in all the bloom of maiden beauty, overcast by a tender shade of melancholy, that gave tenfold interest to her lovely countenance, and mellowed the lustre of her dark hazel eyes, were seen sitting at the door of a cottage on the banks of one of the tributaries of the silver Tweed. ”

“ Poor Annette was shocked exceedingly by the unexpected death of the nurse; but sorrow is said to be near akin to love; and, in the delicate attentions of her cousin Roderick, the fair Celt felt her grief strangely soothed, and her bosom experience sensations to which it had previously been a stranger.
Old Campbell witnessed the progress of this passion with great delight, and gave the young couple every opportunity for studying "la belle passion:" indeed, the necessary confinement of Roderick in the tower threw them so much together, that it was no wonder they became attached to each other. ”

“ Love, I have said, taught me diligence. I applied to my profession anew, determined to be a lawyer, and the husband of Catherine. I waded through whole tomes of black-letter statutes, studied my way over forty folios of decisions, and did what I suppose no one ever did before—read Grigor on the Game-laws. Not half-a-dozen practitioners in the country could draw out a deed of settlement with equal adroitness—not one succeeded in putting fewer double meanings into a will. ”

“ Now, sir, it is my conviction, that where there is no speculation, there can be no luck. As well might a man with his hands in his pockets expect a guinea to drop into them. People who, perhaps, have been born with a silver spoon in their mouths, or had enough to purchase them a hot joint every day, thrust upon them by accident, will tell you, in speaking of any particular subject, "Oh, I will have nothing to do with it—it is only a speculation." ”

“ In the olden time, the banks of the Tarras formed one of the favourite resorts of the freebooters of the Scottish Borders, who, in the midst of their inaccessible morasses, either set pursuit at defiance, or made an easy conquest of those who were foolhardy enough to follow them into their strongholds. They have long ceased their roving and adventurous life—pursuer and pursued have long been lying in the quiet churchyards, or slumbering in their forgotten graves among the wild hills where they fought and fell ”

“ The apprentices, meanwhile, were all alive and ready for action, expressing by their eloquent leers, which I could not repress, their pleasure in thus having an opportunity—such is human nature—of repaying their taskmaster for his severity, as well as of witnessing one of the most curious operations they had ever heard of. All this time the patient continued his screams—having, at intervals, recourse to exclamatory expostulation.
"Cruel fiends!" he cried, "will you dash me to pieces? Will nothing less serve you than to see a poor harmless being, who never injured one of you, reduced to atoms? ”

“ Arkwright, who was long considered a mere bee-headed barber, had—though in a great measure by the aid of others—brought his mechanism to a degree of perfection that not only astonished the world, but held out a more inexhaustible and a richer source of wealth to Britain than its mines did to Peru. Deep and bitter were the imprecations of many against the power-loom; for it is difficult for any man to see good in that which dashes away his hard-earned morsel from the mouths of his family, and leaves them calling in vain for food. ”

“ We had only one resource left now, and that was one of feeble promise—both bower anchors were cut away—the cables ran out to the clinches, and snapped like threads; the sheet-cable shared the same fate.
"I knew it," exclaimed the captain—"I knew it was in vain. No hemp that ever was twisted could stand the strain of such a sea and breeze. It is all over with us now! Every man look out for his own safety! You had better lash yourselves to the spars, my lads!"
The momentary check given to the ship brought her broadside round to the breakers. ”

“ All his ingenuity, however, could not prevent the marriage of William Wotherspoon and Lucy Edington from taking place. They were united; and the "happy occasion" was celebrated with much mirth and festivity; but the spirit of a demon was hovering over the ceremonies, in the shape of the evil wishes of Lorimer, whose worst passions, where all were bad, were excited to their utmost tension by an occurrence which at once extinguished his own hopes for ever, and consummated those of the man whom, of all others, he most detested—Wotherspoon. ”