TROUBLESOME DAUGHTERS. PART I. CHAPTER I. A WINDY NIGHT. "But when that the cloud lays its cheek to the flood, THE Oh, merry he sits 'mang his jovial crew, Wi' the helm-heft in his hand, And he sings aloud to his boys in blue, -AINSLIE. HE wind was blowing in from the sea, and the waves were thundering along the rugged coast of Galloway, one wild and dusky evening toward the latter end of September. In vain did the flickering sunset struggle for a corner of the heavens-it was speedily overcast; and invisible then was the long line of white-capped breakers, whose steady beat upon the land could be heard far and near, ere they surged over the rocks, rolling in their treasures of weed, and grass, and broken shells before them. Far as the eye couid reach, it was a bleak and lonely region over which, unchecked, the sea-breeze made its way. The moorlands were wastes of bog and moss, surmounted by the red waving grass peculiar to the district; the woods were mere clumps of trees roughly huddled together, and these being perpetually bent before the prevailing blast, presented, from their stunted growth and misshapen boughs, an air of sorrowful endurance, which was heightened almost to the pitch of pathos when winter displayed their bare and interlaced branches. Solitary stragglers with the same woe-worn aspect dotted the fields, affording, in their battered and beaten-down condition, a series of roofs for the black cattle of the country, who in bad weather cowered underneath. Between the villages, which lay at a considerable distance from each other, there were but few dwellinghouses, and only at long intervals were tracts of land separated from one another by walls of loosely-piled stones. These last were viewed, on the evening in question, with especial ill-will by a sportsman who, at the close of a successful day's fishing, was making his way down from the moor, and who, incumbered as he was with his rod, his creel, and various good trout of creditable size and weight, found getting over the tottering obstacles no easy matter. Supporting himself, however, by an occasional interjection, and by the consideration that if he could once gain the high-road he should proceed much more rapidly, he bade defiance to the roughness of the way and the buffeting of the elements, and stepped forward with as good a heart as could be expected from a wet and weary man who sees a neighborhood with which he is at best but imperfectly acquainted rapidly becoming obscured in the twilight. Captain Rupert Evelyn-for such was the stranger's name-had been from an early hour stumbling about among moss-hags, peat-marshes, and stony beds of mountain-torrents which only burst forth during the floods of winter; and had he allowed himself to own the truth, he must have confessed that nothing would now have gladdened his eyes more than the view, within a reasonable distance, of Castle Kenrick, the friend's house at which he was then staying. |