to occupy her husband's cottage, and
cultivate, on no very heavy terms, a croft of land adjacent. Her son, Benjamin,
in the meanwhile, grew up to man's estate, and, moved by that impulse which
makes men seek marriage, even when its end can only be the perpetuation of
misery, he wedded and brought a wife, and, eventually, a son, Reuben, to share
the poverty of Beersheba.
    The Laird of Dumbiedikes15 had hitherto been moderate in his exactions,
perhaps because he was ashamed to tax too highly the miserable means of support
which remained to the widow Butler. But when a stout active young fellow
appeared as the labourer of the croft in question, Dumbiedikes began to think so
broad a pair of shoulders might bear an additional burden. He regulated, indeed,
his management of his dependants (who fortunately were but few in number) much
upon the principle of the carters whom he observed loading their carts at a
neighbouring coal-hill, and who never failed to clap an additional brace of
hundredweights on their burden, so soon as by any means they had compassed a new
horse of somewhat superior strength to that which had broken down the day
before. However reasonable this practice appeared to the Laird of Dumbiedikes,
he ought to have observed, that it may be overdone, and that it infers, as a
matter of course, the destruction and loss of both horse, and cart, and loading.
Even so it befell when the additional »prestations« came to be demanded of
Benjamin Butler. A man of few words, and few ideas, but attached to Beersheba
with a feeling like that which a vegetable entertains to the spot in which it
chances to be planted, he neither remonstrated with the Laird, nor endeavoured
to escape from him, but, toiling night and day to accomplish the terms of his
task-master, fell into a burning fever and died. His wife did not long survive
him; and, as if it had been the fate of this family to be left orphans, our
Reuben Butler was, about the year 1704-5, left in the same circumstances in
which his father had been placed, and under the same guardianship, being that of
his grandmother, the widow of Monk's old trooper.
    The same prospect of misery hung over the head of another tenant of this
hard-hearted lord of the soil. This was a tough true-blue Presbyterian, called
Deans, who, though most obnoxious to the Laird on account of principles in
church and state, contrived to maintain his ground upon the