United States or Italy ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


This fact will account for the rapturous mood in which Polly found herself when, after making her bonnet, washing and ironing her best set, blacking her boots and mending her fan, she at last, like Consuelo, "put on a little dress of black silk" and, with the smaller adornments pinned up in a paper, started for the Shaws', finding it difficult to walk decorously when her heart was dancing in her bosom.

The sunken hollows of the Lady Desdemona's sides gave extraordinary prominence to her low-hanging and not too well-filled dugs. Her shape and general appearance were strangely different from those of the sleek and shining young bitch whose beauty had aroused so much enthusiasm in the minds of all judges who had seen her at Shaws.

This process ended, the two hounds turned and, with many friendly nudges and shoulder-rubbings, proceeded up the meadow together in the wake of the Nuthill party, toward the house of Shaws. One cannot translate precisely Finn's remark to Desdemona at the end of the examination, but the sense of it was probably something of this sort: "Yes, you are all right. I like you. Let's be friends."

I told him what had passed between Rankeillor and myself before the house of Shaws. "Well, and so ye will hang!" said he. "Ye'll hang beside James Stewart. There's your fortune told." "I hope better of it yet than that," said I; "but I could never deny there was a risk." "Risk!" says he, and then sat silent again.

"I winna be a'thegither sure o' that!" returned the soutar. "Doobtless ye'll dee as the Spirit shaws ye!" James made no answer, and neither spoke again that night. The next morning, James sent to the clerk of the synod his resignation of his parish and office.

Balfour of Shaws, that you would marry James More's daughter, and him hanged? Well, then, where there's no possible marriage there shall be no manner of carryings on, and take that for said. Lasses are bruckle things," she added, with a nod; "and though ye would never think it by my wrunkled chafts, I was a lassie mysel', and a bonny one."

I was in full career, when I heard the cough right overhead, and, jumping back and looking up, beheld a man's head in a tall nightcap, and the bell mouth of a blunderbuss, at one of the first-story windows. "It's loaded," said a voice. "I have come here with a letter," I said, "to Mr. Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws. Is he here?" "From whom is it?" asked the man with the blunderbuss.

Our ramble this morning took us again up the Rhymer's Glen, and by Huntley Bank, and Huntley Wood, and the silver waterfall overhung with weeping birches and mountain ashes, those delicate and beautiful trees which grace the green shaws and burnsides of Scotland.

THE weeks that followed taught the Shaws, as many other families have been taught, how rapidly riches take to themselves wings and fly away, when they once begin to go. Mr. Shaw carried out his plans with an energy and patience that worked wonders, and touched the hearts of his hardest creditors.

I learned long afterwards that she had despatched a horseman by daylight to Rankeillor at the Queen's Ferry, whom she knew to be the doer for Shaws, and had then in her pocket a letter from that good friend of mine, presenting, in the most favourable view, my character and prospects. But had I read it I could scarce have seen more clear in her designs.