Who can this little M.be, of whom he writes so tenderly, except a child?
Who can this woman be, whose ill health causes him such anxiety, unless a wife?
Of no one _but_ a wife could he write so freely to his sister.
The place to which he asks her to "steal a visit" must needs be a home to which a man could invite his sister.

I fancy it is thus made very clear that at this period Matthew Haygarth was secretly married and living at Spotswold, where his wife and son were afterwards buried, and whence the body of the son was ultimately removed to Dewsdale to be laid in that grave which the father felt would soon be his own resting-place.

That allusion to the Ullerton talk of London roisterings indicates that Matthew's father believed him to be squandering the paternal substance in the metropolis at the very time when the young man was leading a simple domestic life within fifty miles of the paternal abode.

No man could do such a thing in these days of rapid locomotion, when every creature is more or less peripatetic; but in that benighted century the distance from Ullerton to Spotswold constituted a day's journey.

That Matthew was living in one place while he was supposed to be in another is made sufficiently clear by several passages in his letters, all more or less in the strain of the following:-- "I was yesterday--markett-day--at G., wear I ran suddennly agenst Peter Browne's eldest ladd.