enough to be handed about in manuscript, and read at teaparties, by the elite of the town. Poor old Miss Bond, who kept the town boarding-school, got the piece nicely dressed up, somewhat upon the principle on which Macpherson translated Ossian; and at her first school-examination-proud and happy day for the author !—it was recited with vast applause, by one of her prettiest young ladies, before the assembled taste and fashiʼn of Cromarty.

CHAPTER V.

"The wise

Shook their white aged heads o'er me, and said,
Of such materials wretched men were made."

BYRON.

THE report went abroad about this time, not without some foundation, that Miss Bond purposed patronizing me. The copy of my verses which had fallen into her hands—a genuine holograph-bore atop a magnificent view of the Doocot, in which horrid crags of burnt umber were perforated by yawning caverns of Indian-ink, and crested by a dense pine forest of sap-green; while vast waves, blue on the one side and green on the other, and bearing blotches of white lead atop, rolled frightfully beneath. And Miss Bond had concluded, it was said, that such a genius as that evinced by the sketch and the "poem " for those sister arts of painting and poesy in which she herself excelled, should not be left to waste itself uncared for in the desert wilderness. She had published, shortly before, a work, in two slim volumes, entitled, "Letters of a Vil lage Governess,”—a curious kind of medley, little amenable to the ordinary rules, but a genial book, notwithstanding, with more heart than head about it; and not a few of the incidents which it related had the merit of being true. It was an unlucky merit for poor Miss Bond. She dated her book from Fortrose, where she taught what was designated in the Almanac as the boarding-school of the place, but which, accord

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ing to Miss Bond's own description, was the school of the village governess." And as her tales were found to be a kind of mosaics composed of droll bits of fact picked up in the neighborhood, Fortrose soon became considerably too hot for her. She had drawn, under the over-transparent guise of the niggardly Mrs. Flint, the skin-flint wife of a "paper minister," who had ruined at one fell blow her best silk dress, and a dozen of good eggs to boot, by putting the eggs in her pocket when going out to a party, and then stumbling over a stone. And, of course, Mrs. Skinflint and the Rev. Mr. Skinflint, with all their blood-relations, could not be other than greatly gratified to find the story furbished up in the printed form, and set in fun. There were other stories as imprudent and as amusing, of young ladies caught eavesdropping at their neighbors' windows; and of gentlemen, ill at ease in their families, sitting soaking among vulgar companions in the public house; and so the authoress, shortly after the appearance of her work, ceased to be the village governess of Fortrose, and became the village governess of Cromarty.

It was on this occasion that I saw, for the first time, with mingled admiration and awe, a human creature,—not dead and gone, and merely a printed, name,—that had actually published a book. Poor Miss Bond was a kindly sort of person, fond of children, and mightily beloved by them in turn; and, though keenly alive to the ludicrous, without a grain of malice in her. I remember how, about this time, when, assisted by some three or four boys more, I had succeeded in building a huge house, full four feet long and three feet high, that contained us all, and a fire, and a great deal of smoke to boot, Miss Bond, the authoress, came, and looked in upon us, first through the little door, and then down through the chimney, and gave us kind words, and seemed to enjoy our enjoyment very much; and how we all deemed her visit one of the greatest events that could possibly have taken place. She had been intimate with the parents of Sir Walter Scott; and, on the appearance of Sir Walter's first publication, the Minstrelsey of the Scottish Border," she had taken a fit of

enthusiasm, and written to him; and, when in the cold paroxysm, and inclined to think she had done something foolish, had received from Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, a characteristically warm-hearted reply. She experienced much kindness at his hands ever after; and when she herself became an author, she dedicated her book to him. He now and then procured boarders for her; and when, after leaving Cromarty for Edinburgh, she opened a school in the latter place, and got on with but indifferent success, Sir Walter-though struggling with his own difficulties at the time-sent her an enclosure of ten pounds, to scare, as he said in his note, "the wolf from the door." But Miss Bond, like the original of his own Jeanie Deans, was a "proud bodie;" and the ten pounds. were returned, with an intimation to the effect that the wolf had not yet come to the door. Poor lady! I suspect he came to the door at last. Like many other writers of books, her voyage through life skirted, for the greater part of the way, the bleak lee shore of necessity; and it cost her not a little skilful steering at times to give the strand a respectable offing. And in her solitary old age, she seemed to have got fairly aground. There was an attempt made by some of her former pupils to raise money enough to purchase for her a small annuity; but when the design was in progress, I heard of her death. She illustrated in her life the remark recorded by herself in her "Letters," as made by an humble friend :—“It's no an easy thing, Mem, for a woman to go through the world without a head,” i. e., single and unprotected.

From some unexplained cause, Miss Bond's patronage never reached me. I am sure the good lady intended giving me lessons in both drawing and composition; for she had said it, and her heart was a kind one; but then her time was too much occupied to admit of her devoting an occasional hour to myself alone; and as for introducing me to her young-lady classes, in my rough garments, ever greatly improved the wrong way by my explorations in the ebb and the peat-moss, and frayed, at times, beyond even my mother's ability of repair, by warping to the tops of great trees, and by my feats as a cragsman,—

that would have been a piece of Jack-Cadeism, on which, then or now, no village governess could have ventured. And so I was left to get on in verse and picture-making quite in the wild way, without care or culture.

My schoolfellows liked my stories well enough,—better, at least on most occasions, than they did the lessons of the master; but, beyond the common ground of enjoyment which these extempore compositions furnished to both the "sennachie," and his auditors, our tracts of amusement lay widely apart. I disliked, as I have said, the yearly cock-fight-found no pleasure in cat-killing, or in teasing at nights, or on the street, the cross-tempered, half-witted eccentrics of the village,-usually kept aloof from the ordinary play-grounds, and very rarely mingled in the old hereditary games. On the other hand, with the exception of my little friend of the cave, who, even after that disastrous incident, evinced a tendency to trust and follow me as implicitly as before, my schoolmates cared as little for my amusements as I did for theirs; and, having the majority on their side, they of course voted mine to be the foolish ones. And certainly a run of ill-luck followed me in my sports about this time, that did give some show of reason to their decision.

In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer, lately deceased, of which the one entitled the

Military Medley," discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous plans, neatly colored, of battalions drawn up in all possible forms, to meet all possible exigencies; while the other, which also abounded in prints, treated of the noble science of fortification according to the system of Vauban. I pored over both works with much perseverance; and, regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to construct, on a very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The sea-shore in the immediate neighborhood of the town appeared to my inexperienced eye an excellent field for the carrying on of a campaign. The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by the waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers