The impression carried away from the contem-century ago. Mr Hill's business in a country then plation of this remarkable picture, by persons of imagination and sensibility, will probably be a restless curiosity, not untinged with melancholy; especially when they learn that the Tinker's Daughter was a Saxon lady, fragments of whose mournful history are still floating in the broken traditions of the Northern Highlands.

tions of the wild grandeur of Highland scenery, the inspiration and pathos of Highland music and song, the patriarchal sway and feudal supremacy of chieftains, and the bravery and devotedness of clans, was Sarah Bradshaw :- "The beautiful Sarah Bradshaw," as she was fondly called; and rarely has the epithet been more justly bestowed. Sarah was the only child of a wealthy London goldsmith. She saw Mr Hill very frequently; | for her father was a principal partner and director of the York Building Company; and ever the discourse between the imaginative girl and the romantic Aaron, was of dark pine forests, splintered mountains, gleaming lakes, and winding glens, with the sprinkling of chiefs and ladies, deer, capercailzie, and clansmen, necessary to give a living interest to the poet's delineations. It was to Sarah like reading Milton's Comus, or the most witching pages of Spenser's ethereal imaginings; like living with Miranda in her enchanted island, or wandering with Rosalind in the forest of Ardennes. Sarah could have envied Mr Hill his greenwood life, his birchen bower by the margin of that enchanted lake, where the wild deer came to drink, and the cushat crooded, and where those lovely melodies, of which she had picked up a few from Aaron's whistling, rang all day to the maiden's light toil, and the stroke of the woodman's axe on the old gray pines of that primeval forest.

them to be very sly-disturbed his ordinary fifteen minutes' nap before going back to his shop precisely at two o'clock, he told her rather gruffly that he had something else to note, than either the eyes or noses of his customers.

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I dare say, my dear, it might be Lord John Montacute. He is getting his aunt Lady Betty's jewels set for his bride, Miss Courteney," said Mrs Bridget Bradshaw, the sister of the goldsmith: "the family jewels go to the elder branch. All the Montacute family are sandy-haired."

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Sandy-haired, dear aunt! this was hair of sunbeams!"

"That may be, my dear child, though I can't say I ever saw hair like sunbeams, often as I have been employed in plaiting hair of all shades for lockets, rings, and pins, for my grandfather, father, and brother. BRADSHAWS & BRADSHAW is not a firm of yesterday, Sarah: we can, I have heard my poor father say, trace the company almost up to Shore, the husband of the unhappy Jane Shore you have seen in Covent Garden, my love."

Sarah heeded not her aunt's antiquities of the firm: her fancy was still disporting with the tangles of that "hair of sunbeams." "How noble and picturesque a figure were this—a hunter or an archer among Mr Hill's wild-wood glens of the Highlands!"

The dignity and antiquity of the firm were, this afternoon, quite lost on Sarah, though, in general, she entertained a becoming, if reasonable, value for the consequence she derived from the great wealth and the respectability of her long-established family.

In ordinary circumstances, a new dress, a drum, —as a fashionable assembly was then called,—or a night's sleep, might have freed Sarah's fancy from "the tangles" of the stranger's hair. The impression was not, however, effaced when Mr Hill on this evening appeared, self-invited, as he often did, at Mrs Bridget's tea-table; to which, indeed, his chief attraction was the sweetness, sprightliness, and romance of a charming young woman, whom he had known from her infancy, and loved as if she had been his favourite niece, or younger sister, and whose romantic tendencies he had helped to inspire and foster, and, above all, who understood and listened to him with evident

In the window of the small withdrawing-room of a very small house in Lombard Street, and immediately over her father's shop, Sarah was seated one fitfully bright April morning,-occupied, or seemingly occupied, in making up a head-dress for her aunt Mrs Bridget; stealing, now a few lines of the garden-scene in Romeo and Juliet, which lay open on her work-table, now a quick glance at what gay dames and young cavaliers alighted from their coaches, and entered the shop below, and one more furtive at the large mirror, which reflected her whole petite figure, and all the substantial luxuries and tasteful decorations of her gay and pretty apartment-not more gay and pretty than its youthful mistress, as she sprang up, and, screening herself behind the drapery of a rich window-curtain, stole a yet closer view of the very handsome young man-" a young gentleman of very striking figure, indeed," was her mental reflection-whom her father followed to the shop-pleasure. door, and held there for a few seconds in earnest conversation. A profusion of golden, short curly hair, breaking round a face of the richest bloom, a nose slightly aquiline, and the small delicate mouth, and round, cleft chin of an Apollo, tempted the maiden to a yet nearer inspection, when "the hawking eye," the bright, sapphire, piercing eye, appropriate to such a face and complexion, pounced upon the peeping damsel, and, with a heightened colour and slight flutter of nerves, Sarah drew back as the young man very slightly touched his hat to her.

Mr. Bradshaw, at dinner, then taken by London citizens at the fashionable hour of one o'clock, -could recollect of no gentleman who wore his own curling, golden hair without powder;" and as Sarah's sly interrogatories-for she intended

"Ah, ha, sparkler! I have caught something worth showing you at last. I give you three guesses, fair Sarah: what is it, now?"

"Verses to the air I played you last night?—I know the wares you deal in, good uncle. Perchance your last ode to tear up into nice crispy papillotes; a fresh pot of mignionette for my cockney-balcony; or a mandarin, or other China monster, for my chimney-piece?-No bounds to your bounty, I know," said Sarah, laughing.

"Nor to your gratitude, my saucy mistress; at least since I presented you, fifteen years ago, with that little gilt Dutch-built husband of sugar-paste, at Bartlemy Fair, which you crushed to pieces in a pretty rage, because it did not speak and look like a right true man.' I have caught you a right true man' to-day, Sarah,—one of the finest

ooking fellows I ever met with in any country, Lochnaveen, a north-western chief: a real, live Highland chief, Sarah."

with his stately presence. "In London, however, dwindled into plain Mr M'Ranald of Lochnaveen," continued Mr Hill. "He ought to be welcome

"Heavens!" cried Sarah, dropping the Mechlin at every fireside in England, whose hospitable castle frill at which she plaited.

Mr Hill smiled at what he imagined the effects of his former poetical discourses on the Highlands; and old Bradshaw, rubbing his eyes, said, halfawake, "Oh, ay, true!-Lochnaveen do you call him? That is the sandy-haired young gentleman you saw to-day, Sarah. Get us tea, child."

door was never yet shut against the stranger of any land."

Mistress Bridget curtsied to the lowest dip of Queen Anne's last drawing-room, and Sarah, looking very demure, in spite of Mr Hill's intelligent glance, which she studiously evaded, bended in courtesy like a Clarissa Harlowe; and was rather relieved that the chief did not particularly notice

Sarah needed not this information: instinctively she knew that the Highland chief and the golden-her. It was an escape. haired stranger were the same individual. Destiny-presentiment-all the romantic machinery of incipient passion-were already at work in the flattering bosom of the goldsmith's daughter. Her fate went far to prove that their mysterious foreshadowings may sometimes be more than a jest.

"Don't be in such haste mustering your cockleshells, Sarah," said Mr Hill. "I took the freedom, as my friend Lochnaveen is quite a stranger in London, and, I dare say, tired enough of his solitary coffee-house, to ask him to take tea with Mistress Bridget. We must not deny the rites of hospitality to the most hospitable people on earth besides, we have our oak-bark business to talk over, you remember, Mr Bradshaw ?"

Old Mr Bradshaw, though rather disposed to resent this inroad on his domestic privacy, received his guest with that sort of gruff, blunt, but hearty civility, which well enough became the independent and wealthy London tradesman.

Mr Hill had several motives in forcing the introduction of Lochnaveen upon the London citizen. Like most human motives they were oddly enough mixed and tangled. He wished to show the already half-enlightened chief, whose bold, noble bearing and manly character he admired, that there were other worlds not inferior to that in which his towering pride and absurd prejudices had been formed and fostered. Aaron, the philosopher, wished to contemplate the pride of hereditary wealth, (Bradshaw being, as Mrs Bridget said, no new name in trade,) conflicting with the pride of Highland aristocracy,-aristocracy in this case in the pure abstract; for both Mr Hill and a certain Bhalie Hossack, factor and factotum of Lochnaveen, knew how little real and tangible metallic substance swelled out into that enormous magnitude which the young chief occupied in his own esteem, and in the fond conceit of his clan. Nor were these Mr Hill's sole motives in bringing about this acquaintance. The poet longed to witness the effect produced by his handsome high-born hero of the Highlands upon his romantic city heroine,-to test, if it were indeed true that there might be more genuine nobility of nature, more of genius and feeling, and of the finer essence of humanity, in a London shopkeeper's daughter, than animated the mind and warmed the heart of the lofty far-descended scion of heroes and bards.

"Mac Mic Raonull, the Chief of the clan Raonull," said Aaron, gravely and formally introducing his friend into the snug city drawingroom, which, to the ladies, appeared at once filled

"I had the pleasure of seeing the gentleman in My Shop, this morning," said old Bradshaw sturdily. He could not undertake the pronunciation of Highland names nor titles. "I give him a hearty welcome to a plain London citizen's fireside, -to a castle, if you will, friend Aaron,-every Englishman's house is his castle." The young chief would have belied his birth and his country, had he, when temper served, wanted tact,-a quality how inferior to intellect, how different from humanity, though often mistaken for them.

"Chiefs and clans!" said he, with a slight smile, "nonsense every where, but nonentities in England! I am astonished that Mr Hill can have loaded his memory with the trash of bardic rhymes and clannish genealogies! To me, Mr Bradshaw, no birth nor growth is at present of half so much consequence as that of my oaksticks, and my two-year-old stirks. This droving promises well for us."

"Come! the young Scot is not so very rampant a fool, after all," thought old Bradshaw. "I won't call my young friend an egregious hypocrite," thought Aaron; "yet in the halls of M'Raonull, six inches of the ready steel of my other friend Donhuil nam Biodag (Donald of the Dirk) had requited that speech, if seriously uttered by Saxon lips; ay, and no questions asked,—no‘crowner's-'quest law' to interfere, nor any other law."

During this conversation, Sarah, not yet seated, had been arranging and disarranging the beautiful little filigree tea-china, which might have been made for the use of the fairy-court; and which, long afterwards, found an honoured place among the treasures of Strawberry-hill, as the Bradshaw Porcelain. She had not spoken one word, and was relieved to find that she still passed unnoticed by the chief. Yet intensely did she hang on every syllable he uttered; and at his equivocal and depreciating sentiment her sweetly-murmured involuntary half deprecating whisper of “ Ah, no, sure!" made him look hastily round.

"The hawking eye," was again all abroad over the lovely and suddenly-crimsoned face.

Sarah now, in deep confusion, played off and on with one of the richly jewelled rings she wore. It slipped from the slender finger on the Turkey carpet; and the young chief, with that deference to her sex and personal charms, to which neither birth nor wealth gave her any claim with him, stooped, recovered, and gracefully presented it to the deeply blushing owner; his genial vanity not

a little gratified by the maidenly, bashful flutter of her whom he recognised as the peeping girl of old Bradshaw's window.

Mac Mic Raonull had the catholic taste of a Highlander, and was, moreover, just of the age to admire beauty and womanly fascination, whereever he found them,-ay, even in "a Tinker's Daughter;" for such, in the pride of his Highland blood, prejudices, and education, appeared to him the beautiful Sarah Bradshaw.

Exquisitely beautiful she certainly appeared, and of a style of beauty as new to the chief as were to her his fine form, his golden hair, and glowing complexion.

The scandalous chronicle of either the ward of Cripplegate, or Farringdon Without, bore, that there was some trifling mixture of Hebrew blood in the family of the rich goldsmith. Mistress Bridget, however, stoutly maintained what was probably the simple truth, that the beautiful foreign wife of her ancestor, Nathaniel Bradshaw, was a Venetian girl of pure Christian blood, that had eloped with the young Englishman, who, for a year or two, had studied some nice branch of his art under the tuition of her father.

As has sometimes been observed in greater families, the beauty of the Venetian girl, after a slumber of two generations, broke out with augmented splendour and more finished delicacy, in her granddaughter, Sarah. The fine painting by Sir Peter Lely, in his best days, to which Mr. Hill now directed the attention of the chief, might, indeed, have been taken for the portrait of Miss Bradshaw. The resemblance was striking and true to the most minute particulars; even to the small and delicately formed hands and feet, the long, slender, swan-like neck, and the arch sidelong expression of the up-turned side-face; but how could the painter's art represent those eyes, deep and dark as midnight, yet swimming so softly in humid brilliancy, or the delicious languid movements of the nymph-like figure, and all the bends and graceful undulations of that small finely-shaped head, so unlike in their light contours to the massive northern beauties which Lochnaveen had been accustomed to admire ? What a heaven of breathing loveliness was comprised within that little face, which he could have covered with his broad fair hand. Lochnaveen could less readily interpret the varying expression which often glanced forth the living soul of that beautiful countenance. In the fashion of that day, Sarah's hair was drawn up from her fair forehead; but, in defiance of fashion, a few stray ringlets, of a rich, warm, deep brown, shaded her temples and neck, and were partly tucked back behind the small shell-like rose-tipped ears. Whether it be true or not that all semi-barbarians are fond of "baubles" and glitter, and that even the chiefs of the Gael were at that period little better than bold warlike semibarbarians, it must be owned that the rich ornaments of Nighean Ceard, or "the Goldsmith's or Tinker's Daughter," came in for their full share of the Highlander's admiration.

"

* Highland pride had no other name for those who'trafficked in gold, and acted as the bankers of that age, than Tinker.

Bradshaw, though a man of plain character and manners himself, was fully sensible of the claims he possessed from his wealth and standing; a quality at any time equivalent to station in his regard. He would, besides, have thought, that to have his only child, and heiress, arrayed with less cost than she exhibited, was defrauding the commerce and arts of the country of the encouragement due to them from a man of his fortune. The costly diamond pendants that glittered, half-concealed, through those silky ringlets, the diamond buckles of the embroidered slippers that sheathed those slender feet which

"Like little mice crept out and in," below the full drapery of the rich brocaded petticoat, came in for their full share of the admiration of our young chief, though the loveliness of the wearer predominated.

"Could life and health be shut up in so slender and delicate a form?" came to be his mental question; and he soon learned that life, and health, and gaiety, fine talents, uncommon generosity and sweetness of nature, and, above all, a true woman's heart, capable of the deepest and most passionate attachment, were all enshrined in that most delicate shape. Such knowledge was not acquired all at once; and, like many mortal lessons, if it came not too late to benefit, it came far too late to bless.

"Is not this a noble specimen of the Highland chief, fair Sarah?" said Mr Hill, when Lochnaveen and her father withdrew. "Here is a man, now, absolutely worth a fine woman's falling in love with."

Sarah, though not, in general, the most silent of damsels, at least with her adopted uncle, Mr Hill, made no reply.

"I protest, Mr Hill,' said Mrs Bridget, " Mr Makmakrandluk is, besides being handsome enough, that is, for a man,—and I think, my dear, it must have been him you saw this morning

"I don't think it was," said Sarah, with quickness of manner, and mental hesitation. "I meant to observe, Mr Hill, that Mr Makmukrandluk, besides being handsome enough for a gentleman, is a very well-bred man indeed; that is, never to have lived in Lon'on. I expected to see something like the Indian kings my poor mother visited, of which we read in Mr Addison's Spectators. Fie! then, Mr Hill, the gentleman does not wear that short chequered petticoat,which would, indeed, have been extremely awkward, not to say indecorous towards my niece and myself, had any gentleman appeared before us in such unseemly attire."

"No, no, my dear Mrs Bridget,-I only whispered that probability exactly as he was announced, to put you on your guard in case of the worst. I cannot, though," he added archly, "imagine what frightened pretty Sarah; she could not have overheard my alarming whisper."

"Don't call me pretty Sarah any more, if you please, sir," said Sarah, half pouting, "you forget that I grow old now."

“Indeed!” cried Hill smiling with meaning.
"But, my good Mr Hill," said Mistress Bridget,
as Englishwomen, celebrated over the whole

globe for their extreme delicacy and modesty,the bare idea of drinking tea in the same room with a gentleman in a-a-petticoat-a short petticoat!—to my niece and me-"

"Lochnaveen would be shocked to offend your delicacy, madam. He leaves his philibeg at home, along with several other of his national habits, even more exceptionable, perhaps, than this offending garment which, by the way, the chiefs seldom wear. Their costume is the truis, a long light pantaloon and stocking in one piece. I assure you, Sarah, if you saw my friend Mac Mic Raonull in his native tartans, with his pistols and skiendhu in his belt, and the brechan plume dancing in his bonnet, you would see a fine fellow. With his foot on the Rock of the Gathering, the war-pipe and the cry of Craigdhu' ringing in his ears, and his clan trooping in and mustering round him, Ranald looks twice the man he appears in London streets, as mighty a difference as is be tween the imprisoned eagle and the noble bird hovering free above his mountain eyrie."

"He looks the noble chieftain even here," thought Sarah,—and she said aloud, " Is it not mortifying to hear this gentleman, with his proud, brave looks and lofty port,-with the exterior of one born to command, and to lead on his fellows to noble and chivalrous deeds, and to whom high thoughts should be native and familiar-lessen and scorn at his natural advantages. Oh, if I were the head of one of these brave tribes!"—And the enthusiastic girl clasped her hands.

English nobility at that period than they have since become. And Mr Bradshaw had, at all events, even then, too much sterling sturdy pride and English good-sense, to be ambitious of a noble alliance for his heiress, though he might have suspected his daughter herself of such a weakness. But that she, the darling of a circle of wealthy kindred, and his beloved child and sole heiress, should place her affections on a red-shank-a Highland Scot-something far more wild and outlandish than a mere Scot-appeared as improbable as if she had actually fallen in love with the leader of a predatory Arab tribe, or with one of Mistress Bridget's Indian kings.

Had the passion been mutual, this feeling of astonishment was not likely to be confined to the goldsmith:-The clan, the proud kinsmen; above all, the mother of the chief, would have been as little prepared to see him bear home, as a bride, the daughter of the veritable Irish tinker who strolled in his valleys, as the heiress of a Saxon churl, however rich-a London tinker. Her language had no appellation to distinguish between these professions; nor, in Highland minds of that day, was there a shade of difference, save that the "Saxon caird" might possess a little more pelf,an excellent commodity when it could be obtained from the Southron by strength of arm, or sleight of hand; but to gain which no man, boasting the name of Raonull, could be so utterly base as to degrade his blood by matrimonial alliance.

The young chief of the clan Raonull was a posthumous child. He owed his very existence to the prejudices of country and birth. The vast and unproductive mountain estates had fallen to a female, worthy to have inherited a male fief; to have led clans to battle; and better fitted to wield pistol and dagger than spindle and distaff. Rather late in life, and solely upon reasons of state, Nighean Donachd Ruadh, in preference to every other suitor, had married a distant kinsman, an idle, handsome, good-for-nothing fellow, who, by a rapid succession of deaths, was left the chief of his clan, though laird of only his dogs and fowlingpiece. He died, or was killed-it was never well ascertained which-in a brawl, at a bridal, a few months after his marriage. The chieftainess assembled the elders of the tribe, and declared her resolution, if her expected child was not a male, to marry, next in order, Donhuil nam Biodag, the present male representative of the tribe.

"You would be the thing in the world the most unlike this chieftain's mother, Sarah," said Aaron, smiling," Nighean Donachd Ruadh-or the daughter of Red Duncan-is a proper Tartar-who would make less of a man's life, who chanced to offend | her, than your cook would of a live lobster for fish-sauce. And, pardon the chief, my pretty old Sarah! No man breathing has a loftier notion of the dignities and immunities of his High Mightiness, Mac Mic Raonull, than has Master Ranald. I don't know whether to smile or admire, when I know that in his secret heart, and with great natural shrewdness, and even a sort of halfcivilized education to boot, my friend does, at this moment, consider himself at least twice as good a man as the King of England, or, as he would say, the Elector of Hanover. You admired his ease of manners, Mistress Bridget :-I assure you Lochnaveen would be quite as much at home in the court of St James' as in your drawing-room. Donald of the Dirk, then a mere stripling, was, cannot surmise, my dear Sarah, what an im- by the birth of Ranald, disappointed of the matrimensely great man a Highland chief is; and, like monial honour thus intended him; but next to whales and krakens, and such like monsters, the the boy-chief in influence as in rank, he lived the farther north—the nearer the pole they are the guardian of young Ranald's person, and of the more swollen and huge do we find them." honour of the clan; that homage and reverence being paid to his blood to which fortune gave him no claim. His skill in the chase-for the country still abounded with game of all kinds-furnished his only ostensible means of living. Most of his days were passed in the solitude of the mountains, where he stalked the deer, feeding an enthusiastic fancy on inspiring traditions of the past glory of his race, or amusing his loneliness with the wild songs and poetry which he composed in honour of

You

Sarah permitted Mr Hill to smile, or scoff, if he chose: she admired with earnest reverence. "This was the true nobility-independent of every thing extrinsic; this was native grandeur of soul." Sarah saw that soul through a woman's eyes in her friend's animated pictures of the stirring pibroch, the thrilling war-cry, the thronging clansmen, and, above all, the handsome young chief.

City marriages were much rarer among the