Page:Monthly scrap book, for September.pdf/14

14 I wrote the letter that night to Provost Maitland, and by the retour of the post, I got an answer, with twenty pounds for Mrs Malcolm, saying, "that it was with sorrow he heard so small a trifle could be serviceable." When I took the letter and the money, which was in a bank-bill, she said, "this is just like himsel'." She then told me, that Mr Maitland had been a gentleman's son of the east country, but driven out of his father's house, when a laddie, by his step-mother; and that he had served as a servant lad with her father, who was the Laird of Yillcogie, but ran through his estate, and left her, his only daughter, in little better than beggary with her auntie, the mother of Captain Malcolm, her husband that was. Provost Maitland in his servitude had ta'en a notion of her, and when he recovered his patrimony, and had become a great Glasgow merchant, on hearing how she was left by her father, he offered to marry her, but she had promised herself to her cousin, the Captain, whose widow she was. He then married a rich lady, and in time grew, as he was, Lord Provost of the city; but his letter with the twenty pounds to me, shewed that he had not forgotten his first love. It was a short, but a well-written letter, in a fair hand of write, containing much of the true gentleman; and Mrs Malcolm said, "Who knows but out of the regard he once had for their mother, he may do something for my five helpless orphans."

Thirdly, upon tile subject of taking my cousin, Miss Betty Lanshaw, for my first wife, I have little to say. It was more out of a compassionate