e hundred pounds, and the proprietor of a neat and
well-furnished cottage, with a piece of land adjoining, before she had
completed her nineteenth year; and when we add that she had hair like
the raven's wings when the sun glances upon them, cheeks where the lily
and the rose seemed to have lent their most delicate hues, and eyes like
twin dew-drops glistening beneath a summer moonbeam, with a waist and an
arm rounded like a model for a sculptor, it is not to be wondered at
that "a' the lads cam' wooin' at her." But she had a woman's heart as
well as woman's beauty and the portion of an heiress. She found her
cottage surrounded, and her path beset, by a herd of grovelling
pounds-shillings-and-pence hunters, whom her very soul loathed. The
sneaking wretches, who profaned the name of lovers, seemed to have
_money_ written on their very eyeballs, and the sighs they professed to
heave in her presence sounded to her like stifled groans of--_your
gold_--_your gold_! She did not hate them, but she despised their
meanness; and as they one by one gave up persecuting her with their
addresses, they consoled themselves with retorting upon her the words of
the adage, that "her _pride_ would have a fall!" But it was not from
pride that she rejected them, but because her heart was capable of love
--of love, pure, devoted, unchangeable, springing from being beloved,
and because her feelings were sensitive as the quivering aspen, which
trembles at the rustling of an insect's wing. Amongst her suitors there
might have been some who were disinterested; but the meanness and sordid
objects of many caused her to regard all with suspicion, and there was
none among the number to whose voice her bosom responded as the needle
turns to the magnet, and frequently from a cause as inexplicable. She
had resolved that the man to whom she gave her hand should wed her for
herself--and for herself only. Her parents had died in the same month;
and about a year after their death she sold the cottage and the piece of
ground, and took her journey towards Edinburgh, where the report of her
being a "great fortune," as her neighbours term her, might be unknown.
But Tibby, although a sensitive girl, was also, in many respects, a
prudent one. Frequently she had heard her mother, when she had to take
but a shilling from the legacy, quote the proverb, that it was

"Like a cow in a clout,
That soon wears out."

Proverbs we know are in bad taste, but we quote it