Laird Howison's sorrow moderated as his years increased; and when Henry and Helen had children, and when they had grown up to run about, he requested that they should be sent to him every year, to pull the primroses around Primrose Hall; and they were sent. One of them, a girl, the image of her mother, he often wept over, and said, he hoped to live to love her, as he had loved her mother. Willie Galloway often visited his friends in Cheshire, and remained "canny Willie" to the end of the chapter.
It has been stated by the greatest critics the world ever saw--whose names we would mention, if we did not wish to avoid interfering with the simplicity of our humble annals--that no fictitious character ought to be made at once virtuous and unfortunate; and the reason given for it is that mankind, having a natural tendency to a belief of an adjustment, even in this world, of the claims of virtue and the deserts of vice, are displeased with a representation which at once overturns this belief, and creates dissatisfaction with the ways of Providence. This may be very good criticism, and we have no wish to find fault with it as applied to works intended to produce a certain effect on the minds of readers; but, so long as Nature and Providence work with machinery whose secret springs are hid from our view, and evince--doubtless for wise purposes--a disregard of the adjustment of rewards and punishments for virtue and vice, we shall not want a higher authority than critics for exhibiting things as they are, and portraying on the page of truth, wet with unavailing tears, goodness that went to the grave, not only unrewarded, but struck down with griefs that should have dried the heart and grizzled the hairs of the wicked.
In a little haugh that runs parallel to the Tweed--at a part of its course not far from Peebles, and through which there creeps, over a bed of white pebbles, a little burn, whose voice is so small, except at certain places where a larger stone raises its "sweet anger" to the height of a tiny "buller," that the lowest note of the goldfinch drowns it and charms it to silence--there stood, about the middle of the last century, a cottage. Its white walls and dark roof, with some white roses and honeysuckle flowering on its walls, bespoke the humble retreat of contentment and comfort. The place went by the name of Bramblehaugh, from the sides of the small burn being lined, for several miles, with the bramble. The sloping collateral ground was covered with shrubs and trees of various kinds, which harboured, in the summer months, a great collection of birds--the blackbird, the starling, the mavis, and others of the tuneful choir--whose notes rendered harmonious the secluded scene where they sang unmolested. The spot is one of those which, scattered sparingly over a wild country, woo the footsteps of lovers of nature, and, by a few months of their simple charms, regenerate the health, while they quicken and gratify the business-clouded fancies of the denizens of smoky towns.