Page:The Cottagers of Glenburnie - Hamilton (1808).djvu/141

 could suppose them to have been riven asunder, to give a passage to the clear stream which flowed between them. As they advanced, the hills receded on either side, making room for meadows, and corn fields, through which the rapid burn pursued its way, in many a fantastic maze.

If the reader is a traveller, he must know, and if he is a speculator in canals he must regret, that rivers have in general a trick of running out of the straight line. But however they may in this resemble the moral conduct of man, it is but doing justice to these favourite children of nature, to observe, that, in all their wanderings, each stream follows the strict injunctions of its parent, and never for a moment loses its original character. That our burn had a character of its own, no one who saw its spirited career could possibly have denied. It did not, like the lazy and luxuriant screams, which glide through the fertile valleys of the south, turn and wind in listless apathy, as if it had no other object