may easily suppose that a poor modest humble scholar
who has won his way through the classics, yet has fallen to leeward in
the voyage of life, is no uncommon personage in a country where a certain
portion of learning is easily attained by those who are willing to suffer
hunger and thirst in exchange for acquiring Greek and Latin. But there is
a far more exact prototype of the worthy Dominie, upon which is founded
the part which he performs in the romance, and which, for certain
particular reasons, must be expressed very generally.

Such a preceptor as Mr. Sampson is supposed to have been was actually
tutor in the family of a gentleman of considerable property. The young
lads, his pupils, grew up and went out in the world, but the tutor
continued to reside in the family, no uncommon circumstance in Scotland
in former days, where food and shelter were readily afforded to humble
friends and dependents. The laird's predecessors had been imprudent, he
himself was passive and unfortunate. Death swept away his sons, whose
success in life might have balanced his own bad luck and incapacity.
Debts increased and funds diminished, until ruin came. The estate was
sold; and the old man was about to remove from the house of his fathers
to go he knew not whither, when, like an old piece of furniture, which,
left alone in its wonted corner, may hold together for a long while, but
breaks to pieces on an attempt to move it, he fell down on his own
threshold under a paralytic affection.

The tutor awakened as from a dream. He saw his patron dead, and that his
patron's only remaining child, an elderly woman, now neither graceful nor
beautiful, if she ever had been either the one or the other, had by this
calamity become a homeless and penniless orphan. He addressed her nearly
in the words which Dominie Sampson uses to Miss Bertram, and professed
his determination not to leave her. Accordingly, roused to the exercise
of talents which had long slumbered, he opened a little school and
supported his patron's child for the rest of her life, treating her with
the same humble observance and devoted attention which he had used
towards her in the days of her prosperity.

Such is the outline of Dominie Sampson's real story, in which there is
neither romantic incident nor sentimental passion; but which, perhaps,
from the rectitude and simplicity of character which it displays, may
interest the heart and fill the eye of the reader as irresistibly a