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.

512 WAVERLEY NOVELS.
parents could not allow the air of Heaven to breathe on them -me they
committed to the winds and the waves-I am nevertheless their lawful child,
as well as their puling offspring of advanced age and decayed health I
saw them, Adam-Winter showed the nursery to me while they were gathering courage to receive me in the drawing-room. There they lay, the children
of predilection, the riches of the East expended that they might sleep soft
and wake in magnificence. I, the eldest brother-the heir-I stood beside
their bed in the borrowed dress which I had so lately exchanged for the
rags of an hospital. Their couches breathed the richest perfumes, while I
was reeking fiom a pest-house; and I - I repeat it -the heir, the produce
of their earliest and best love, was thus treated. No wonder that my look
was that of a basilisk."
"You speak as if you were possessed with an evil spirit," said Hartley;
" or else you labour under a strange delusion."
" You think those only are legally married over whom a drowsy parson
has read the ceremony from a dog's-eared prayer-book? It may be so in
your English law - but Scotland makes Love himself the priest. A vow
betwixt a fond couple, the blue heaven alone witnessing, will protect a confiding girl against the perjury of a fickle swain, as much as if a Dean had
performed the rites in the loftiest cathedral in England. Nay, more; if the
child of love be acknowledged by the father at the time when he is baptized
-if he present the mother to strangers of respectability as his wife, the
laws of Scotland will not allow him to retract the justice which has, in these
actions, been done to the female whoni he has wronged, or the offspring of
their mutual love. This General Tresham, or Witherington, treated my
unhappy mother as his wife before Gray and others, quartered her as such
in the fimily of a respectable man, gave her the same name by which he
himself chose to pass for the time. IIe presented me to the priest as his
lawful offspring; and the law of Scotland, benevolent to the helpless child,
will not allow him now to disown what he so formally admitted. I know
my rights, and am determined to claim them."
" You do not then intend to go on board the Middlesex? Think a little
-You will lose your voyage and your commission."
"' will save my birth-right," answered Middlemas. "When I thought
of going to India, I knew not my parents, or how to make good the rights
which 1 had through them. That riddle is solved. I am entitled to at least
a third of Monqada's estate, which, by Winter's account, is considerable.
But for you, and your mode of treating the small-pox, I should have had
the whole. Little did I think, when old Gray was likely to have his wig
pulled off, for putting out fires, throwing open windows, and exploding
whisky and water, that the new system of treating the small-pox was to
cost me so many thousand pounds."
" You are determined then," said Hartley, "on this wild course?"
" I know my rights, and am determined to make them available," answered
the obstinate youth.
" Mr. Richard Middlemas, I am sorry for you."
" Mr. Adam Hartley, I beg to know why I am honoured by your sorrow."
" I pity you," answered Hartley, "both for the obstinacy of selfishness,
which can think of wealth after the scene you saw last night, and for the
idle vision which leads you to believe that you can obtain possession of it."
"Selfish!" cried Middlemas; "why, I am a dutiful son, labouring to
clear the memory of a calumniated mother —And am I a visionary?-Why,
it was to this hope that I awakened, when old Monqada's letter to Gray,
devoting me to perpetual obscurity, first roused me to a sense of my situation, and dispelled the dreams of my childhood. Do you think that I would
ever have submitted to the drudgery which I shared with you, but that, by
doing so, I kept in view the only traces of these unnatural parents, by means
of which I proposed to introduce myself to their notice, and, if necessary,