to the east rose Cheviot, the giant of the
hills; to the west, lesser mountains reared their fantastic forms,
thinly studded here and there with dwarf alders, which the birds of
heaven had planted, and their progeny had nestled in their branches; to
the north and the south stretched a long and secluded glen, where beauty
blushed in the arms of wildness--and thick woods, where the young fir
and the oak of the ancient forest grew together, flourished beneath the
shelter of the hills. Fertility also smiled by the sides of the rivulet,
though the rising and setting sun threw the shadows of barrenness over
it. Around the cottage stood a clump of solitary firs, and behind it an
enclosure of alders, twisted together, sheltered a garden from the
storms that swept down the hills.

Now, many years ago, a stranger woman, who brought with her a female
domestic and a male infant, became the occupant of this house among the
hills. She lived more luxuriously than the sheep-farmers in the
neighbourhood, and her accent was not that of the Borders. She was
between forty and fifty years of age, and her stature and strength were
beyond the ordinary stature and strength of women. Her manners were
repulsive, and her bearing haughty; but it seemed the haughtiness of a
weak and uneducated mind. Her few neighbours, simple though they were,
and little as they saw or knew of the world, its inhabitants and its
manners, perceived that the stranger who had come amongst them had not
been habituated to the affluence or easy circumstances with which she
was then surrounded. The child also was hard-favoured, and of a
disagreeable countenance; his back was strangely deformed; his feet were
distorted, and his limbs of unequal length. No one could look upon the
child without a feeling of compassion, save the woman who was his
mother, his nurse, or his keeper (for none knew in what relation she
stood to him), and she treated him as a persecutor, who hated his sight,
and was weary of his existence.

She gave her name as Mrs Baird; and, as the child grew up, she generally
in derision called him "_AEsop_," or, in hatred, "the little monster!"
but the woman-servant called him Ebenezer, though she treated him with a
degree of harshness only less brutal than she whom he began to call
mother. We shall, therefore, in his history mention him by the name of
Ebenezer Baird. As he grew in years, the disagreeable expression of his
countenance became stronger, his defo