The report went abroad about this time, not without some foundation,
that Miss Bond purposed patronizing me. The copy of my verses which had
fallen into her hands--a genuine holograph--bore a-top a magnificent
view of the Doocot, in which horrid crags of burnt umber were perforated
by yawning caverns of Indian ink, and crested by a dense pine-forest of
sap-green; while vast waves blue on the one side and green on the other,
and bearing blotches of white lead a-top, rolled frightfully beneath.
And Miss Bond had concluded, it was said, that such a genius as that
evinced by the sketch and the "poem" for those sister arts of painting
and poesy in which she herself excelled, should not be left to waste
itself uncared for in the desert wilderness. She had published, shortly
before, a work, in two slim volumes, entitled, "Letters of a Village
Governess"--a curious kind of medley, little amenable to the ordinary
rules, but a genial book notwithstanding, with more heart than head
about it; and not a few of the incidents which it related had the merit
of being true. It was an unlucky merit for poor Miss Bond. She dated her
book from Fortrose, where she taught what was designated in the Almanac
as the boarding-school of the place, but which, according to Miss Bond's
own description, was the school of the "village governess." And as her
tales were found to be a kind of mosaics composed of droll bits of fact
picked up in the neighbourhood, Fortrose soon became considerably too
hot for her. She had drawn, under the over-transparent guise of the
niggardly Mrs. Flint, the skinflint wife of a "paper minister," who had
ruined at one fell blow her best silk dress, and a dozen of good eggs to
boot, by putting the eggs in her pocket when going out to a party, and
then stumbling over a stone. And, of course, Mrs. Skinflint and the Rev.
Mr. Skinflint, with all their blood-relations, could not be other than
greatly gratified to find the story furbished up in the printed form,
and set in fun. There were other stories as imprudent and as amusing--of
young ladies caught eavesdropping at their neighbours' windows; and of
gentlemen, ill at ease in their families, sitting soaking among vulgar
companions in the public-house; and so the authoress, shortly after the
appearance of her work, ceased to be the village governess of Fortrose,
and became the village governess of Cromarty.

It was on this occasion that I saw, for the first time, with mingl