What great and gay doings I saw there needn't be told just now. Lady
Catherine kept the best and most fashionable company, and she was
never at home an evening that the house was not full. There was money
to be made, and plenty of all things; but I did not like it; and
having saved a trifle, one of her ladyship's sons-in-law--he was the
best of the two--got me the place at the toll-bar.

You remember me there, Master Willie, and what great times we had on
Saturday afternoons. You may recollect, too, how many foot-passengers
used to come and go. It was my amusement to watch them when I had
nothing better to do; but of all who passed my window, there were none
took my attention so completely as two young men, who always walked
arm-in-arm, and seemed to be brothers. I thought I had seen their
strongly-marked Highland faces before, and by degrees learned that
they were none other than the old man's two sons, who had been at poor
Menie's last funeral, but were now grown up, and studying for the
medical profession at the college in Glasgow. Their father evidently
kept them on short allowance, judging from their coarse tartan
clothes, and continual munching of oaten cakes: but I was told they
were hard students, and particularly clever in the anatomy class. One
dark, dreary morning, about the Christmas-time, I noted that Lady
Catherine and her family had been in my dreams all night--their grand
house, and gay goings-on in London, mingling strangely with the old
story of Master Arthur and the farmer's daughter. When the newspaper,
which I shared with the schoolmaster, came, judge of my astonishment
to read that her ladyship had died suddenly in a fit of apoplexy,
which came upon her at the whist-table, and her remains had been
conveyed to the family vault in Dumbartonshire. There was a lesson on
the uncertainty of life! and it is my trust that I found in it a use
of warning; but the continual news and strangers at the toll-bar, the