plot has great merit.  You’ll perhaps be displeased at the freedom of my remarks; but in the first place freedom is absolutely necessary in the cause in which we are about to embark, and it must be understood to be one if not the chief article of our creed.  In the second (though it should have been the first), know that I always say what I think, or say nothing.  Now as to my own deeds—­I shall make no apologies (since they must be banished from our code of laws) for sending you a hasty and imperfect sketch of what I think might be wrought up to a tolerable form.  I do not recollect ever to have seen the sudden transition of a high-bred English beauty, [1] who thinks she can sacrifice all for love, to an uncomfortable solitary Highland dwelling [2] among tall red-haired sisters and grim-faced aunts.  Don’t you think this would make a good opening of the piece?  Suppose each of us try our hands on it; the moral to be deduced from that is to warn all young ladies against runaway matches, and the character and fate of the two sisters would be unexceptionable. I expect it will be the first book every wise matron will put into the hand of her daughter, and even the reviewers will relax of their severity in favour of the morality of this little work.  Enchanting sight! already do I behold myself arrayed in an old mouldy covering, thumbed and creased and filled with dogs’-ears.  I hear the enchanting sound of some sentimental miss, the shrill pipe of some antiquated spinster, or the hoarse grumbling of some incensed dowager as they severally inquire for me at the circulating library, and are assured by the master that ’tis in such demand that though he has thirteen copies they are insufficient to answer the calls upon it, but that each of them may depend upon having the very first that comes in!!!  Child, child, you had need be sensible of the value of my correspondence.  At this moment I’m squandering mines of wealth upon you when I might be drawing treasures from the bags of time!  But I shall not repine if you’ll only repay me in kind—­speedy and long is all that I require; for all things else I shall take my chance.  Though I have been so impertinent to your book, I nevertheless hope and expect you’ll send it to me.  Combie [1] and his daughter (or Mare, as you call her) are coming to town about this time, as I’m informed, and you may easily contrive to catch them (wild as they are) and send it by them, for there’s no judging what a picture will be like from a mere pen-and-ink outline—­if that won’t do, is there not a coach or a carrier?  One thing let me entreat of you:  if we engage in this undertaking, let it be kept a profound secret from every human being.  If I was suspected of being accessory to such foul deeds, my brothers and sisters would murder me, and my father bury me alive—­and I have always observed that if a secret ever goes beyond those immediately concerned in its concealment it very soon ceases to be a secret.”

[1] Lady Juliana.