'Oh! You might have come straight from chambers in the Temple,'
instead of having been two months in the Highlands! Look at this
beautiful trunk of a tree, which the wood-cutters have left just
in the right place for the light. I will put my plaid over it,
and it will be a regular forest throne.'

'With your feet in that puddle for a regal footstool! Stay, I
will move, and then you can come nearer this way. Who lives in
these cottages?'

'They were built by squatters fifty or sixty years ago. One is
uninhabited; the foresters are going to take it down, as soon as
the old man who lives in the other is dead, poor old fellow!
Look--there he is--I must go and speak to him. He is so deaf you
will hear all our secrets.'

The old man stood bareheaded in the sun, leaning on his stick at
the front of his cottage. His stiff features relaxed into a slow
smile as Margaret went up and spoke to him. Mr. Lennox hastily
introduced the two figures into his sketch, and finished up the
landscape with a subordinate reference to them--as Margaret
perceived, when the time came for getting up, putting away water,
and scraps of paper, and exhibiting to each other their sketches.
She laughed and blushed Mr. Lennox watched her countenance.

'Now, I call that treacherous,' said she. 'I little thought you
were making old Isaac and me into subjects, when you told me to
ask him the history of these cottages.'

'It was irresistible. You can't know how strong a temptation it