I succeeded in getting a bed in the mansion-house, without, like Marsyas of old, perilling my skin; and though there was but little of interest in the immediate neighbourhood, and not much to be enjoyed within doors--for I could procure neither books nor congenial companionship--with the assistance of my pencil and sketch-book I got over my leisure hours tolerably well. My new friend Isabel would have given me as much of her conversation as I liked; for there was many a point on which she had to consult me, and many a mystery to state, and secret to communicate; but, though always interested in her company, I was also always pained, and invariably quitted her, after each lengthened _tête-à-tête_, in a state of low spirits, which I found it difficult to shake off. There seems to be something peculiarly unwholesome in the society of a strong-minded maniac; and so I contrived as much as possible--not a little, at times, to her mortification--to avoid her. For hours together, however, I have seen her perfectly sane; and, on these occasions, she used to speak much about her brother, for whom she entertained a high reverence, and gave me many anecdotes regarding him, not uninteresting in themselves, which she told remarkably well. Some of these my memory still retains. "There were two classes of men," she has said, "for whom he had a special regard--Christian men of consistent character; and men who, though they made no profession of religion, were honest in their dealings, and of kindly dispositions. And with people of this latter kind he used to have a great deal of kindly intercourse, cheerful enough at times--for he could both make a joke and take one--but which usually did his friends good in the end. So long as my father and my mother lived, he used to travel across the country once every year to pay them a visit; and he was accompanied, on one of these journeys, by one of this less religious class of his parishioners, who had, however, a great regard for him, and whom he liked, in turn, for his blunt honesty, and obliging disposition. They had baited for some time at a house in the outer skirts of my brother's parish, where there was a child to baptize, and where, I fear, Donald must have got an extra dram; for he was very argumentative all the evening after; and finding he could not agree with my brother on any one subject, he suffered him to shoot a-head for a few hundred yards, and did not again come up with him, until, in passing through a thick clump of natural wood, he found him standing, lost in thought, before a singularly-shaped tree. Donald had never seen such a strange-looking tree in all his days before. The lower part of it was twisted in and out, and backwards and forwards, like an ill-made cork-screw; while the higher shot straight upwards, direct as a line; and its taper top seemed like a finger pointing at the sky. 'Come, tell me, Donald,' said my brother, 'what you think this tree is like?' 'Indeed, I kenna, Mr. Lachlan,' replied Donald; 'but if you let me take that straight bit aff the tap o't, it will be gey an' like the _worm_ o' a whisky still.' 'But I cannot want the straight bit,' said my brother; 'the very pith and point of my comparison lies in the straight bit. One of the old fathers would perhaps have said, Donald, that that tree resembled the course of the Christian. His early progress has turns and twists in it, just like the lower part of that tree; one temptation draws him to the left--another to the right: his upward course is a crooked one; but it is an upward course for all that; for he has, like the tree, the principle of sky-directed growth within him: the disturbing influences weaken as grace strengthens, and appetite and passion decay; and so the early part of his career is not more like the warped and twisted trunk of that tree, than his latter years resemble its taper top. He shoots off heavenward in a straight line.'" Such is a specimen of the anecdotes of this poor woman. I saw her once afterwards, though for only a short time; when she told me that, though people could not understand _us_, there was meaning in both her thoughts and in mine; and some years subsequently, when I was engaged as a journeyman mason in the south of Scotland, she walked twenty miles to pay my mother a visit, and stayed with her for several days. Her death was a melancholy one. When fording the river Conon in one of her wilder moods, she was swept away by the stream and drowned, and her body cast upon the bank a day or two after.