Project Gutenberg's Olive, by Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

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Title: Olive
A Novel

Author: Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

Illustrator: G. Bowers

Release Date: July 23, 2007 [EBook #22121]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OLIVE ***

Produced by David Widger

OLIVE

A NOVEL

BY DINAH MARIA CRAIK, AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock

"BY THE AUTHOR OF
'JOHN HALIFAX, GENTLEMAN'"

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY G. BOWERS

1875

FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1850.

[Illustration: Frontispiece]

[Illustration: Titlepage]

OLIVE.

CHAPTER I.

"Puir wee lassie, ye hae a waesome welcome to a waesome warld!"

Such was the first greeting ever received by my heroine, Olive Rothesay.
However, she would be then entitled neither a heroine nor even "Olive
Rothesay," being a small nameless concretion of humanity, in colour and
consistency strongly resembling the "red earth," whence was taken the
father of all nations. No foreshadowing of the coming life brightened
her purple, pinched-up, withered face, which, as in all new-born
children, bore such a ridiculous likeness to extreme old age. No tone
of the all-expressive human voice thrilled through the unconscious wail
that was her first utterance, and in her wide-open meaningless eyes
had never dawned the beautiful human soul. There she lay, as you and
I, reader, with all our compeers, lay once-a helpless lump of breathing
flesh, faintly stirred by animal life, and scarce at all by that
inner life which we call spirit. And, if we thus look back, half in
compassion, half in humiliation, at our infantile likeness-may it not be
that in the world to come some who in this world bore an outward image
poor, mean, and degraded, will cast a glance of equal pity on
their well-remembered olden selves, now transfigured into beautiful
immortality?

I seem to be wandering from my Olive Rothesay; but time will show the
contrary. Poor little spirit! newly come to earth, who knows whether
that "waesome welcome" may not be a prophecy? The old nurse seemed
almost to dread this, even while she uttered it, for with superstition
from wh