SHORTLY after the commencement of the New Year, the good Lady of Semplehaugh and her family removed to Edinburgh, where it was their custom to spend a considerable part of every winter season. Their departure deprived Mr Blair of a cheerful society, in which he mingled at least once a-week, and of many little occasional attentions and incidents which served to break and diversify the even and uniform tenor of his retired existence. The day on which he was to pay a visit at the mansion-house, was a thing to be looked forward to before it came, and to be looked back upon after it had passed. Above all, it was a thing to be continually talked about by little Sarah; and, in short, the want of it formed a blank in the domestic calendar of Cross-Meikle.

The winter, moreover, had set in with more than usual severity. Drifted snow deepened all the roads in the neighbourhood, and rendered them quite impassable, or very nearly so, for several weeks in succession; and the profuse thaw which followed, made matters little better in a country where the soil consists, in so great a measure, of wet and heavy clay. To travel about to any distance in the midst of such a season, was a thing quite out of the question with Mr Blair, and nearly as much so with the few friends who remained in his neighbourhood during that part of the year. The gay, the busy, the active, had all fled to the cities; and those who stayed were people who stayed only because they could not bear to be absent from their own homes, or preferred solitude to society. Except an occasional call from some brother of the cloth, and the every-day intercourse of his own humbler parishioners, Mr Blair had therefore little to disturb or vary the course of his own solitary life and meditations. It is no wonder that his melancholy sat down upon him every day more and more heavily in such a state of things as this; and that the more heavy it became, his resolution to struggle with it grew so much the fainter and the feebler.