Christie Johnstone | Page 8

exploits.
She liked Lord Ipsden, her cousin once removed, but despised him for
being agreeable, handsome, clever, and nobody.
She was also a little bitten with what she and others called the Middle
Ages, in fact with that picture of them which Grub Street, imposing on
the simplicity of youth, had got up for sale by arraying painted glass,
gilt rags, and fancy, against fact.
With these vague and sketchy notices we are compelled to part, for the
present, with Lady Barbara. But it serves her right; she has gone to
establish her court in Perthshire, and left her rejected lover on our
hands.
Journeys of a few hundred miles are no longer described.
You exchange a dead chair for a living chair, Saunders puts in your
hand a new tale like this; you mourn the superstition of booksellers,
which still inflicts uncut leaves upon humanity, though tailors do not
send home coats with the sleeves stitched up, nor chambermaids put
travelers into apple-pie beds as well as damp sheets. You rend and read,
and are at Edinburgh, fatigued more or less, but not by the journey.
Lord Ipsden was, therefore, soon installed by the Firth side, full of the
Aberford.
The young nobleman not only venerated the doctor's sagacity, but half
admired his brusquerie and bustle; things of which he was himself
never guilty.
As for the prescription, that was a Delphic Oracle. Worlds could not
have tempted him to deviate from a letter in it.

He waited with impatience for the yacht; and, meantime, it struck him
that the first part of the prescription could be attacked at once.
It was the afternoon of the day succeeding his arrival. The Fifeshire
hills, seen across the Firth from his windows, were beginning to take
their charming violet tinge, a light breeze ruffled the blue water into a
sparkling smile, the shore was tranquil, and the sea full of noiseless life,
with the craft of all sizes gliding and dancing and courtesying on their
trackless roads.
The air was tepid, pure and sweet as heaven; this bright afternoon,
Nature had grudged nothing that could give fresh life and hope to such
dwellers in dust and smoke and vice as were there to look awhile on her
clean face and drink her honeyed breath.
This young gentleman was not insensible to the beauty of the scene. He
was a little lazy by nature, and made lazier by the misfortune of wealth,
but he had sensibilities; he was an artist of great natural talent; had he
only been without a penny, how he would have handled the brush! And
then he was a mighty sailor; if he had sailed for biscuit a few years,
how he would have handled a ship!
As he was, he had the eye of a hawk for Nature's beauties, and the sea
always came back to him like a friend after an absence.
This scene, then, curled round his heart a little, and he felt the good
physician was wiser than the tribe that go by that name, and strive to
build health on the sandy foundation of drugs.
"Saunders! do you know what Dr. Aberford means by the lower
classes?"
"Perfectly, my lord."
"Are there any about here?"
"I am sorry to say they are everywhere, my lord."

"Get me some"--_(cigarette)._
Out went Saunders, with his usual graceful _empressement,_ but an
internal shrug of his shoulders.
He was absent an hour and a half; he then returned with a double
expression on his face--pride at his success in diving to the very bottom
of society, and contempt of what he had fished up thence.
He approached his lord mysteriously, and said, _sotto voce,_ but
impressively, "This is low enough, my lord." Then glided back, and
ushered in, with polite disdain, two lovelier women than he had ever
opened a door to in the whole course of his perfumed existence.
On their heads they wore caps of Dutch or Flemish origin, with a broad
lace border, stiffened and arched over the forehead, about three inches
high, leaving the brow and cheeks unencumbered.
They had cotton jackets, bright red and yellow, mixed in patterns,
confined at the waist by the apron-strings, but bobtailed below the
waist; short woolen petticoats, with broad vertical stripes, red and white,
most vivid in color; white worsted stockings, and neat, though
high-quartered shoes. Under their jackets they wore a thick spotted
cotton handkerchief, about one inch of which was visible round the
lower part of the throat. Of their petticoats, the outer one was kilted, or
gathered up toward the front, and the second, of the same color, hung in
the usual way.
Of these young women, one had an olive complexion, with the red
blood mantling under it, and black hair, and glorious black