"I," replied he who had spoken, "am the Lewis to whom the paper was addressed."
"You! you!" exclaimed the fisherman; "well, that beats a'--the like o' that I never heard before."
"And I," said another, "am Sir Peter Blakely--the grey-haired dreamer--who expected the April lily to bloom beneath an October sun." And he put a crown into the hand of the fisherman.
"And I," added the third, "am the Solitary himself--this my Catherine, and these my children. He whom I thought dead--dead by my own hand--the man whom I had wronged--sought for me for years, and in this my hermitage that was, he at length found me. It was the grey dawn when I beheld him, and I thought that the ghost of the murdered stood before me. But he spoke--he uttered words that entered my soul. I trembled in his presence. The load of my guiltiness fell as a weight upon me. I was unable to speak, almost to move. He took my hand and led me forth as a child. In my confusion the papers which you found were left behind me. And now, when happiness has shed its light around me, I have come with my benefactor, my friend, my Catherine, and my children, to view the cell of my penitence."
He who has been present at a real Maiden, or Scotch feast of harvest-home, if it should happen that he belongs to the caste that makes the light fantastic toe the fulcrum of the elegant motions of the quadrille, and Hogarth's line of beauty the test of the evolutions of modern grace, might wish that the three sisters had long ago resigned their patronage of the art of dancing, and left the limbs of man, and their motions, to the sole power of the spirit of fun and good humour. Centuries have passed away since first the Maiden called forth the salient energies of the harvest-weary hinds and rosy-cheeked damsels of Scotland. We have only now amongst us the ghost of the old spirit-stirring genius of "the farmer's ha'." The modern vintage feast is only a shadow of the old _Cerealia_--the festival of festivals, as it has been called--at which the young and the old of ancient Greece and Rome resigned themselves to the power of the rosy god, and the _nil placet sine fructu_ was seen in every bright eye, heard in every glad voice, and listened to in every tripping measure. The Scotch Maiden was once what the vintage feasts of the Continent were, and still are. The hinds and maids of one "town" were present at the harvest-home of another; reciprocal visits kept up the spirit of the enjoyment; the fields and farmers' ha's resounded with the merry pipe; the whirling reel mixed up the dancers in its "uniform confusion," the flowing bicker was "filled and kept fou;" kisses, "long and loud," vindicated a place in the world of musical sound; and the Genius of Pleasure ran away with heart and soul to her happy regions--declaring that, for one solitary night in the year, the power of sorrow should have no authority over mournful man. The Maiden of Cairnkibbie, a farm on the property of Faulden--too long ago for the mention of a specific period, but while Maidens (to descend to a pun) were still in the height of their beauty and bloom--was one of the most joyous scenes that ever graced the green, or made the rafters of the barn ring with "hey and how rohumbelow." The farmer, William Hume--some far-off friend of the Paxton family--was rich, as things went in those days; and a gaucy dame, and a fair daughter, Lilly, blessed him with affection and duty. No lass ever graced a Maiden like Lilly Hume; and no free farmer's wife ever extended so hearty a patronage to the feast of fun as did the sleek and comfortable guidwife of Cairnkibbie. The pretty "damysell" was as jimp as "gillie"--