world, and hold all that it can give or take away but
as the midges that the sun-blink brings out, and the evening wind sweeps away!«
    She now made preparation for her night-walk. Her father slept in another
part of the dwelling, and, regular in all his habits, seldom or never left his
apartment when he had betaken himself to it for the evening. It was therefore
easy for her to leave the house unobserved, so soon as the time approached at
which she was to keep her appointment. But the step she was about to take had
difficulties and terrors in her own eyes, though she had no reason to apprehend
her father's interference. Her life had been spent in the quiet, uniform, and
regular seclusion of their peaceful and monotonous household. The very hour
which some damsels of the present day, as well of her own as of higher degree,
would consider as the natural period of commencing an evening of pleasure,
brought, in her opinion, awe and solemnity in it; and the resolution she had
taken had a strange, daring, and adventurous character, to which she could
hardly reconcile herself when the moment approached for putting it into
execution. Her hands trembled as she snooded her fair hair beneath the riband,
then the only ornament or cover which young unmarried women wore on their head,
and as she adjusted the scarlet tartan screen or muffler made of plaid, which
the Scottish women wore, much in the fashion of the black silk veils still a
part of female dress in the Netherlands. A sense of impropriety as well as of
danger pressed upon her, as she lifted the latch of her paternal mansion to
leave it on so wild an expedition, and at so late an hour, unprotected, and
without the knowledge of her natural guardian.
    When she found herself abroad and in the open fields, additional subjects of
apprehension crowded upon her. The dim cliffs and scattered rocks, interspersed
with greensward, through which she had to pass to the place of appointment, as
they glimmered before her in a clear autumn night, recalled to her memory many a
deed of violence, which, according to tradition, had been done and suffered
among them. In earlier days they had been the haunt of robbers and assassins,
the memory of whose crimes is preserved in the various edicts which the council
of the city, and even the parliament of Scotland, had passed for dispersing
their bands, and ensuring safety to the lieges, so near the precincts of the
city. The names of these criminals, and of their atrocities, were still