become even a pleasing kind of meditation. So is it--when Nature imposes
an inevitable duty, she gives man the power of inventing a pleasing
reason for his obedience; nay, so much of a self-dissembler is he, that
he even cheats himself into the belief that his obedience is an act of
his own will. In all which he at least proved the value of one of the
arguments in favour of marriage; for trite it is to say, a bachelor
bears to no one a love which reconciles him to will-making, while a
father, in leaving his means to his children, feels as if he were giving
to himself. But this plan of our merchant-burgess had in addition a
spice of ingenuity in it which still more pleased him--he would so
contrive matters that the daughter and the nephew would become, after
his death, man and wife. He had only some doubts how far their tastes
agreed,--probably an absurd condition, in so much as we all know that
love is often struck out by opposition, and that there is a pleasant
suitability in a husband preferring the head of a herring, and the wife
the tail.

Having thus arrived at a sense of his duty by the pleasant path of his
affection, Mr. David Grierson seized the first opportunity which
presented itself of sounding the heart of Rachel, in order to know in
what direction her affections ran. Sitting in his big chair, all so
comfortably cushioned by the hands of the said Rachel herself, and with
a good fire alongside, due also to her unremitting care, he called her
to him, and placing his arm round her waist, as he was often in the
habit of doing, said to her--

"Rachel, dear, I feel day by day my strength leaving me, and it may be,
nay, will be, that I will not be very much longer with you."

Rachel looked at him for a little, but said nothing, for, as the saying