In the interim, I tried as much as I
could, with verses from Horace and Prior, and all
who have lauded the mixture of literary with rural
life, to call back the visions of last night and this
morning, imagining myself settled in some detached
farm of the estate of Glentanner,
Which sloping hills around enclose---
Where many a birch and brown oak grows;
when I should have a cottage with a small library,
a small cellar, a spare bed for a friend, and live
more happy and more honoured than when I had
the whole barony. But the sight of Castle-Treddles
had disturbed all my own castles in the air. The
realities of the matter, like a stone plashed into a
limpid fountain, had destroyed the reflection of the
objects around, which, till this act of violence, lay
slumbering on the crystal surface, and I tried in
vain to re-establish the picture which had been so
rudely broken. Well, then, I would try it another
way; I would try to get Christie Steele out
of her _public_, since she was not thriving in it, and
she who had been my mother's governante should
be mine. I knew all her faults, and I told her history
over to myself.
She was a grand-daughter, I believe, at least
some relative, of the famous Covenanter of the
name whom Dean Swift's friend, Captain Creichton,
shot on his own staircase in the times of the
persecutions,* and had perhaps derived from her
* Note B.
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