A BONNY bride's sune buskit; eh, Nanny Swinton?"


"But ye're no bonny, Miss Nelly; na, na, ye cannot fill the shoon o' yer leddy mother; ye're snod, and ye may shak yer tails at the Assembly, but ye're far ahint Lady Carnegie."

"An' I've but to dance my set with young Berwickshire Home, I care not though I bide at home after all."

But Nelly Carnegie would have little liked that resource, though she now flung the powder out of her nut-brown hair, and tapped her little mirror with her fan.

In a low dark closet, up a steep stair, in a narrow, confined, dark-browed house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, one of the belles of 17—made her toilette. Her chamber woman, in curch and tartan screen, was old nurse and sole domestic of the high-headed, strong-minded, stately widow of a wild north-country laird, whose son now ruled alone in the rugged family mansion among the grand, misty mountains of Lochaber. Nelly Carnegie was no beauty; [Page 168]not fair as a red-and-white rose, like Lady Eglinton, or any one of her six daughters; not dainty, like............