the cause of her removal to her grandmother’s at Banff; we were both the merest children.  I had and have been attached fifty times since that period; yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness, my tormenting my mother’s maid to write for me to her, which she at last did, to quiet me.  Poor Nancy thought I was wild, and, as I could not write for myself, became my secretary.  I remember, too, our walks, and the happiness of sitting by Mary, in the children’s apartment, at their house not far from the Plain-stones at Aberdeen, while her lesser sister Helen played with the doll, and we sat gravely making love, in our way.

“How the deuce did all this occur so early? where could it originate?  I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl were so violent, that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since.  Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder-stroke—­it nearly choked me—­to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of every body.  And it is a phenomenon in my existence (for I was not eight years old) which has puzzled, and will puzzle me to the latest hour of it; and lately, I know not why, the recollection (not the attachment) has recurred as forcibly as ever.  I wonder if she can have the least remembrance of it or me? or remember her pitying sister Helen for not having an admirer too?  How very pretty is the perfect image of her in my memory—­her brown, dark hair, and hazel eyes; her very dress!  I should be quite grieved to see her now; the reality, however beautiful, would destroy, or at least confuse, the features of the lovely Peri which then existed in her, and still lives in my imagination, at the distance of more than sixteen years.  I am now twenty-five and odd months....

“I think my mother told the circumstances (on my hearing of her marriage) to the Parkynses, and certainly to the Pigot family, and probably mentioned it in her answer to Miss A., who was well acquainted with my childish penchant, and had sent the news on purpose for me,—­and thanks to her!

“Next to the beginning, the conclusion has often occupied my reflections, in the way of investigation.  That the facts are thus, others know as well as I, and my memory yet tells me so, in more than a whisper.  But, the more I reflect, the more I am bewildered to assign any cause for this precocity of affection.”

Though the chance of his succession to the title of his ancestors was for some time altogether uncertain—­there being, so late as the year 1794, a grandson of the fifth lord still alive—­his mother had, from his very birth, cherished a strong persuasion that he was destined not only to be a lord, but “a great man.”  One of the circumstances on which she founded this belief was, singularly enough, his lameness;—­for what reason it is difficult to conceive, except that, possibly (having a mind of the most superstitious cast), she had consulted on the subject some village fortune-teller, who, to ennoble this infirmity in her eyes, had linked the future destiny of the child with it.