Thomson had not sufficiently studied the grand argument of design in this special instance, to hazard a reply.
"The times hae gane clean oot o' joint," continued the old man. "The law has come a' the length o' Cromarty noo; an' for breaking the head o' an impudent fallow, ane runs the risk o' being sent aff to the plantations. Faith, I wish oor Parliamenters had mair sense. What do they ken aboot us or oor country? Diel haet difference do they mak atween the shire o' Cromarty an' the shire o' Lunnon; just as if we could be as quiet beside the red-wud Hielanmen here, as they can be beside the queen. Na, na--naething like a guid cudgel;--little wad their law hae dune for me at the burn o' Newhall the nicht."
Thomson found the character of the old man quite a study in its way; and that of his wife--a very different, and, in the main, inferior sort of person, for she was mean-spirited and a niggard--quite a study too. But by far the most interesting inmate of the cottage was the old man's daughter--the child of a former marriage. She was a pale, delicate, blue-eyed girl, who, without possessing much positive beauty of feature, had that expression of mingled thought and tenderness which attracts more powerfully than beauty itself. She spoke but little--that little, however, was expressive of gratitude and kindness to the deliverer of her father--sentiments which, in the breast of a girl so gentle, so timid, so disposed to shrink from the roughnesses of active courage, and yet so conscious of her need of a protector, must have mingled with a feeling of admiration at finding, in the powerful champion of the recent fray, a modest, sensible young man, of manners nearly as quiet and unobtrusive as her own. She dreamed that night of Thomson, and her first thought, as she awakened next morning, was whether, as her father had urged, he was to be a frequent visitor at Meikle Farness. But an entire week passed away, and she saw no more of him.
He was sitting one evening in his cottage, poring over a book--a huge fire of brushwood was blazing against the earthen wall, filling the upper part of the single rude chamber of which the cottage consisted with a dense cloud of smoke, and glancing brightly on the few rude implements which occupied the lower--when the door suddenly opened, and the farmer of Meikle Farness entered, accompanied by his daughter.