Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance

It was a glorious morning. The wind had fallen quite, and the sun was shining as if he would say, “Keep up your hearts; I am up here still. I have not forgotten you. By and by y...

It cannot but be an unpleasant change for a youth, to pass from a house and lands where he is son--ah, how much better than master! and take a subordinate position in another; b...

But now James Gracie fell sick. They removed him therefore from the men’s quarters, and gave him Cosmo’s room, that he might be better attended to, and warmer than in his own. C...

Cosmo’s temporary quarters were in one of two or three chambers above his own, formerly occupied by domestics, when there were many more of them about the place. He went to bed,...

The noise of their approach, heard from the bottom of the ascent, within the lonely winter castle, awoke profound conjecture, and Grizzie proceeded to light the lanthern that sh...

The gloamin’ came down much sooner in Grannie’s cottage than on the sides of the eastward hills, but the old woman made up her little fire, and it glowed a bright heart to the s...

It was a lovely day. There would be plenty of cold and rough weather yet, but the winter was over and gone, and even to that late region of the north, the time of the singing of...

Lady Joan the same day wrote to her brother Borland, now Mergwain, telling him what had taken place. But it must be some time before she received his answer, for the post from E...

Such power had been accumulated and brought to bear against Glenwarlock, that at length he was reduced almost to the last extremity. He had had to part with his horses before ev...

The next day things went much the same, only that Elsie was not in the field. Cosmo, who had been thinking much over what Aggie had said, and was not flattered that she should t...

There was a garden indeed, but a garden whose ragged, ugly, degraded desolation looked as if the devil had taken to gardening in it. Rather than a grief, it was a pain and disgu...

Again a deep silence descended on the room. The twilight had long fallen, and settled down into the dark. The only thing that acknowledged and answered the clock was the red glo...

In those days Mistress Gracie fell sick, and though for a while neither husband nor grand-daughter thought seriously of her ailment, it proved more than her age, worn with labou...

Things went on very quietly. The glorious days of harvest came and went, and left the fields bare for the wintry revelling of great blasts. The potatoes were all dug up, and aga...

The harvest brought again the opportunity of earning a pound or two, and Cosmo was not the man to let it slip. But he would not go so far from home again, for, though his father...

He entered the wide kitchen, paved with large slabs of slate. One brilliant gray-blue spot of sunlight lay on the floor. It came through a small window to the east, and made the...

The wind had now risen to a hurricane--a rage of swiftness. The house was like a rock assaulted by the waves of an ocean-tempest. The laird had closed all the shutters, and draw...

The summer and autumn had yet to pass before he left home for the university of the north. He spent them in steady work with Mr. Simon. But the steadier his work, and the greate...

The twilight had not yet reached the depth of its mysteriousness, when Cosmo, returning home from casting a large loop of wandering over several hills, walked up to James Gracie...

When Cosmo reached the gate of his lordship’s _policy_, he found it closed, and although he rang the bell, and called lustily to the gate-keeper, no one appeared. He put a hand...

He had come to the resolve to carry his petition first to the farmer in whose fields he had laboured the harvest before the last. The distance was rather great, but he flattered...

As soon as they were out of the kitchen-door, the boy pushed his hand into his father’s; the father grasped it, and without a word spoken, they walked on together. They would of...

Things in the castle went on in the same quiet way as before for some time. Cosmo settled himself in his father’s room, and read and wrote, and pondered and aspired. The househo...

A rough, wild glen it was, to which, far back in times unknown to its annals, the family had given its name, taking in return no small portion of its history, and a good deal of...

When Cosmo came to himself, he had not a notion where he was, hardly indeed knew what he was. His chief consciousness was of an emptiness and a weight combined, that seemed to p...

As there was no more weekly pay for teaching, and no extra hands were longer wanted for farm-labour, Cosmo, hearing there was a press of work and a scarcity of workmen in the bu...

In the morning he woke wondering whether God would that day let him know what he had to do. He was certain he would not have him leave his father; anything else in the way of tr...

The instant the rays of the candle-end were thrown into the cavity, he saw what, expectant as he was, made him utter a cry. He seemed to be looking through a small window into a...

But she had not to pass many houses before she came to that of her grandfather’s mother, an aged woman, I need not say, but in very tolerable health and strength nevertheless. S...

About noon, when both the doctors happened to be out, Joan came to see him, and was more like her former self than she had been for many days. Hardly was she seated when he took...

Without a word, Mr. Simon opened a drawer, and taking from it about a score of leaves of paper, handed one of them to Cosmo. Upon it, in print, was a stanza--one, and no more.

It is time I told my readers something about Joan. But it is not much I have to tell. Cosmo received from her an answer to his letter concerning the ring within a week; and this...

Every step Cosmo took after leaving the village, was like a revelation and a memory in one. When he turned out of the main road, the hills came rushing to meet and welcome him,...

At length Cosmo was able to go out, and Joan did not let him go by himself. For several days he walked only a very little, but sat a good deal in the sun, and rapidly recovered...

The only house in the neighbouring village where Lady Joan sometimes visited, was, as the gardener had told Cosmo, that of the doctor, with whose daughter she had for some years...

That night Cosmo could not sleep. It was a warm summer night, though not yet summer--a soft dewy night, full of genial magic and growth--as if some fire-bergs of summer had drif...

She threaded and forced her way swiftly through the thick-grown shrubs, regardless of thorns and stripping twigs. It was a wilderness for many yards, but suddenly the bushes par...

The next morning, by the steep farm road, and the parish road, which ran along the border of the river and followed it downward, Cosmo, on his way to school, with his books in a...

When Cosmo the second time opened his eyes, he was afresh bewildered. Which was the dream--that vision of wretchedness, or this of luxury? If it was not a dream, how had they mo...

There was once a country in which dwelt a knight whom no lady of the land would love, and that because he spake the truth. For the other knights, all in that land, would say to...

The next day he was still better, and could not think why the doctor would not let him get up. As the day went on, he wondered yet more why Joan did not come to see him. Not onc...

When they had had a little talk over the narrative, the laird desired Cosmo to replace the papers, and rising he went to obey. As he approached the closet, the first beams of th...

Cosmo was not particularly fond of school, and he was particularly fond of holidays; hence his father’s resolve that he should go to school no more, seemed to him the promise of...

This man was not a native of the district, but had for some two years now been a dweller in it. Report said he was the son of a small tradesman in a city at no great distance, b...

But the same instant her face flushed hotter than ever fire or cooking made it; what she had said was in itself true, but what she had not said, yet meant him to understand, was...

As the days went by, Cosmo saw his engagement to Mr. Henderson drawing near, nor had the smallest inclination to back out of it. The farmer would have let him off at once, no do...

“Pirate or not, the old gentleman was a good judge of diamonds!” said Mr. Burns, laying down one of the largest. “Not an inferior one in all I have gone over! Your uncle was a k...

One night the laird sat in the kitchen revolving in his mind the whole affair for the many hundredth time. Was it right to spend on his son’s education what might go to the cred...

Cosmo had no need of a very searching examination of his heart to know that it was mainly the wish to make her some poor return for her devotion, conjoined with the sincere desi...

“I’m no gaein’ to tell ye the nicht, Grizzie. It’s my turn to hae a secret noo! But ye ken weel it’s lang sin’ there’s been onything to be gotten by bidin’ at hame.”

In the middle of the night he was wakened by a loud noise. Its nature he had been too sound asleep to recognize; he only knew it had waked him. He sprang out of bed, was glad to...

To the eyes of Jermyn, Cosmo appeared, mainly from his simplicity, younger than he was, while the doctor’s manners, and his knowledge of the world, made Cosmo regard him as a mu...

Presently, without having thought whither he meant to go, he found himself out of sight of the house--in a favourite haunt, but one in which he always had a peculiar feeling of...

Early the next day, while the sun was yet casting huge diagonal shadows across the wide street, Cosmo climbed to the roof of the Defiance coach, his heart swelling at the though...

And so the moon died out of Cosmo’s heaven. But it was only the moon. The sun remained to him--his father--visible type of the great sun, whose light is too keen for souls, and...

This winter, the wind that drops the ripened fruit not plucked before, blew hard upon old Grannie, who had now passed her hundredth year. For some time Agnes had not been able t...

Until he was laid up, Cosmo had all the winter, and especially after his old master was taken ill, gone often to see Mr. Simon. The good man was now beginning, chiefly from the...

He was roused before sunrise by his father’s cough. After a bad fit, he was very weary and restless. Now, in such a condition, Cosmo could almost always put him to sleep by read...

All this time Cosmo had never written again to Joan; both his father and he thought it better the former only should for the present keep up the correspondence. But months had p...

When Cosmo was left alone in his room, with orders from the doctor to put himself to bed, he sank wearily on a chair that stood with its back to the light; then first his eye fe...

Strange to say, there was no return of his fever. He seemed, through the utter carelessness of mental agony, so to have abandoned his body, that he no longer affected it. A man...

“We shall understand each other better now, I fancy,” said Mr. Burns. “I am glad you have not changed your opinion, for I have changed mine. If it weren’t for you, I should be r...

Soon Cosmo began to recover more rapidly--as well he might, he told Joan, with such a heavenly servant to wait on him! The very next day he was up almost the whole of it. But th...

The same day Cosmo left, Lord Lick-my-loof sent to the castle the message that he wanted to see young Mr. Warlock. The laird returned the answer that Cosmo was from home, and wo...

the ordering of those things in which they consider themselves most interested, and are not unfrequently intrusive. Next to his father and Mr. Simon, Agnes Gracie was the most v...