The Waverley novels, by Sir Walter Scott, complete in 12 vol., printed from the latest English ed., embracing the author's last corrections, prefaces & notes.

I72 WAVE LEY NOVELS.
enforce some favourite topic more emphatically than the exercise of walking
permitted, delayed their progress considerably.
Notwithstanding the fatigues and dangers of the preceding evening, Miss
Wardour was able to rise at her usual hour, and to apply herself to her
usual occupations, after she had first satisfied her anxiety concerning her
father's state of health. Sir Arthur was no farther indisposed than by the
effects of great agitation and unusual fatigue, but these were sufficient to
induce him to keep his bedohamber.
To look back on the events of the preceding day, was, to Isabella, a very
unpleasing retrospect. She owed her life, and that of her father, to the
very person by whom, of all others, she wished least to be obliged, because
she could hardly even express common gratitude towards him without
encouraging hopes which might be injurious to them both. " Why should
it be my fate to receive such benefits, and conferred at so much personal
risk, from one whose romantic passion I have so unceasingly laboured to
discourage? Why should chance have given him this advantage over me?
and why, oh why, should a half-subdued feeling in my own bosom, in spite
of my sober reason, almost rejoice that he has attained it?"
While Miss Wardour thus taxed herself with wayward caprice, she beheld
advancing down the avenue, not her younger and more dreaded preserver,
but the old beggar who had made such a capital figure in the melo-drama
of the preceding evening.
She rang the bell for her maid-servant. "Bring the old man up stairs."
The servant returned in a minute or two-" He will come up at no rate,
madam; —he says his clouted shoes never were on a carpet in his life, and
that, please God, they never shall.- Must I take him into the servants'
hall?"
" No; stay, I want to- speak with him —Where is he?" for she had lost
sight of him as he approached the house.
"Sitting in the sun on the stone-bench in the court, beside the window
of the flagged parlour."'
"Bid him stay there-I'll come down to the parlour, and speak with him
at the window."
She came down accordingly, and found the mendicant half-seated, halfreclining, upon the bench beside the window. Edie Ochiltree, old man and
beggar as he was, had apparently some internal consciousness of the favourable impressions connected with his tall form, commanding features,
and long white beard and hair. It used to be remarked of him, that he
was seldom seen but in a posture which showed these personal attributes to
advantage. At present, as he lay half-reclined, with his wrinkled yet ruddy
cheek, and keen grey eye turned up towards the sky, his staff and bag laid
beside him, and a cast of homely wisdom and sarcastic irony in the expression of his countenance, while he gazed for a moment around the courtyard, and then resumed his former look upward, he might have been taken
by an artist as the model of an old philosopher of the Cynic school, musing
upon the frivolity of mortal pursuits, and the precarious tenure of human
possessions, and looking up to the source from which aught permanently
good can alone be derived. The young lady, as she presented her tall and
elegant figure at the open window, but divided from the court-yard by a
grating, with which, according to the fashion of ancient times, the lower
windows of the castle were secured, gave an interest of a different kind,
and might be supposed, by a romantic imagination, an imprisoned damsel
communicating a tale of her durance to a palmer, in order that he might
call upon the gallantry of every knight whom he should meet in his wanderings, to rescue her from her oppressive thraldom.
After Miss Wardour had offered, in the terms she thought would be most
acceptable, those thanks which the beggar declined as far beyond his merit,
she began to express herself in a manner which she supposed would speak