
eloquence upon the controversies and testimonies of the day.
 

                                 Chapter Ninth

 Her air, her manners, all who saw admired,
 Courteous, though coy, and gentle, though retired;
 The joy of youth and health her eyes displayed;
 And ease of heart her every look conveyed.
                                                                         Crabbe.
 
The visits of the Laird thus again sunk into matters of ordinary course, from
which nothing was to be expected or apprehended. If a lover could have gained a
fair one as a snake is said to fascinate a bird, by pertinaciously gazing on her
with great stupid greenish eyes, which began now to be occasionally aided by
spectacles, unquestionably Dumbiedikes would have been the person to perform the
feat. But the art of fascination seems among the artes perditæ, and I cannot
learn that this most pertinacious of starers produced any effect by his
attentions beyond an occasional yawn.
    In the meanwhile, the object of his gaze was gradually attaining the verge
of youth, and approaching to what is called in females the middle age, which is
impolitely held to begin a few years earlier with their more fragile sex than
with men. Many people would have been of opinion, that the Laird would have done
better to have transferred his glances to an object possessed of far superior
charms to Jeanie's, even when Jeanie's were in their bloom, who began now to be
distinguished by all who visited the cottage at St. Leonard's Crags.
    Effie Deans, under the tender and affectionate care of her sister, had now
shot up into a beautiful and blooming girl. Her Grecian shaped head was
profusely rich in waving ringlets of brown hair, which, confined by a blue snood
of silk, and shading a laughing Hebe countenance, seemed the picture of health,
pleasure, and contentment. Her brown russet short-gown set off a shape, which
time, perhaps, might be expected to render too robust, the frequent objection to
Scottish beauty, but which, in her present early age, was slender and taper,
with that graceful and easy sweep of outline which at once indicates health and
beautiful proportion of parts.
    These growing charms, in all their juvenile profusion, had no power to shake
the steadfast mind, or divert the fixed gaze of the constant Laird of
Dumbiedikes. But there was scarce another eye that could behold this living
picture of health and beauty, without pausing on it with pleasure. The traveller
stopped his weary horse on the eve of entering the city which was the end of his
journey, to gaze at the sylph-like form that tripped by him, with her milk-pail
poised on
