"Take care, you silly womankind--that mum's too near the fire--the bottle will burst; and I suppose you intend to reduce the toast to a cinder as a burnt-offering for Juno, or what do you call her--the female dog there, with some such Pantheon kind of a name, that your wise brother has, in his first moments of mature reflection, ordered up as a fitting inmate of my house (I thank him), and meet company to aid the rest of the womankind of my household in their daily conversation and intercourse with him." "Dear uncle, don't be angry about the poor spaniel; she's been tied up at my brother's lodgings at Fairport, and she's broke her chain twice, and came running down here to him; and you would not have us beat the faithful beast away from the door ?--it moans as if it had some sense of poor Hector's misfortune, and will hardly stir from the door of his room." "Why," said his uncle, "they said Caxon had gone to Fairport after his dog and gun." "O dear sir, no," answered Miss M'Intyre, "it was to fetch some dressings that were wanted, and Hector only wished him to bring out his gun, as he was going to Fairport at any rate." "Well, then, it is not altogether so foolish a business, considering what a mess of womankind have been about it--Dressings, quotha ?--and who is to dress my wig ?--But I suppose Jenny will undertake"-- continued the old bachelor, looking at himself in the glass--"to make it somewhat decent.

And now let us set to breakfast--with what appetite we may.

Well may I say to Hector, as Sir Isaac Newton did to his dog Diamond, when the animal (I detest dogs) flung down the taper among calculations which had occupied the philosopher for twenty years, and consumed the whole mass of materials--Diamond, Diamond, thou little knowest the mischief thou hast done!" "I assure you, sir," replied his niece, "my brother is quite sensible of the rashness of his own behaviour, and allows that Mr.Lovel behaved very handsomely." "And much good that will do, when he has frightened the lad out of the country! I tell thee, Mary, Hector's understanding, and far more that of feminity, is inadequate to comprehend the extent of the loss which he has occasioned to the present age and to posterity--aureum quidem opus--a poem on such a subject, with notes illustrative of all that is clear, and all that is dark, and all that is neither dark nor clear, but hovers in dusky twilight in the region of Caledonian antiquities.

I would have made the Celtic panegyrists look about them.

Fingal, as they conceitedly term Fin-Mac-Coul, should have disappeared before my search, rolling himself in his cloud like the spirit of Loda.