uch cases in court. Meanwhile his neighbours
predicted his final ruin. Those of the higher rank, with some malignity,
accounted him already a degraded brother. The lower classes, seeing
nothing enviable in his situation, marked his embarrassments with more
compassion. He was even a kind of favourite with them, and upon the
division of a common, or the holding of a black-fishing or poaching
court, or any similar occasion when they conceived themselves oppressed
by the gentry, they were in the habit of saying to each other, 'Ah, if
Ellangowan, honest man, had his ain that his forbears had afore him, he
wadna see the puir folk trodden down this gait.' Meanwhile, this general
good opinion never prevented their taking advantage of him on all
possible occasions, turning their cattle into his parks, stealing his
wood, shooting his game, and so forth, 'for the Laird, honest man, he'll
never find it; he never minds what a puir body does.' Pedlars, gipsies,
tinkers, vagrants of all descriptions, roosted about his outhouses, or
harboured in his kitchen; and the Laird, who was 'nae nice body,' but a
thorough gossip, like most weak men, found recompense for his hospitality
in the pleasure of questioning them on the news of the country side.

A circumstance arrested Ellangowan's progress on the highroad to ruin.
This was his marriage with a lady who had a portion of about four
thousand pounds. Nobody in the neighbourhood could conceive why she
married him and endowed him with her wealth, unless because he had a
tall, handsome figure, a good set of features, a genteel address, and the
most perfect good-humour. It might be some additional consideration, that
she was herself at the reflecting age of twenty-eight, and had no near
relations to control her actions or choice.

It was in this lady's behalf (confined for the first time after her
marriage) that the speedy and active express, mentioned by the old dame
of the cottage, had been despatched to Kippletringan on the night of
Mannering's arrival.

Though we have said so much of the Laird himself, it still remains that
we make the reader in some degree acquainted with his companion. This was
Abel Sampson, commonly called, from his occupation as a pedagogue,
Dominie Sampson. He was of low birth, but having evinced, even from his
cradle, an uncommon seriousness of disposition, the poor parents were
encouraged to hope that their bairn, as they expressed it, 'might wag his
pow in a pulpi