“O, Bessy Bell and Mary Gray, They were twa bonnie lasses; They biggit a house on yon burn-brae, And theekit it ower wi’ rashes. Fair Bessy Bell I looed yestreen, And thought I ne’er could alter; But Mary Gray’s twa pawky een Have garr’d my fancy falter.”(d) Scots Song. 

“O, Bessy Bell and Mary Gray,

They were twa bonnie lasses;

They biggit a house on yon burn-brae,

And theekit it ower wi’ rashes.

Fair Bessy Bell I looed yestreen,

And thought I ne’er could alter;

But Mary Gray’s twa pawky een

Have garr’d my fancy falter.”(d)

Scots Song.

We have already mentioned Minna and Brenda, the daughters of Magnus Troil. Their mother had been dead for many years, and they were now two beautiful girls, the eldest only eighteen, which might be a year or two younger than Mordaunt Mertoun, the second about seventeen.—They were the joy of their father’s heart, and the light of his old eyes; and although indulged to a degree which might have endangered his comfort and their own, they repaid his affection with a love, into which even blind indulgence had not introduced slight regard, or feminine caprice. The difference of their tempers and of their complexions was singularly striking, although combined, as is usual, with a certain degree of family resemblance.

The mother of these maidens had been a Scottish lady from the Highlands of Sutherland, the orphan of a noble chief, who, driven from his own country during the feuds of the seventeenth century,[Pg 28] had found shelter in those peaceful islands, which, amidst poverty and seclusion, were thus far happy, that they remained unvexed by discord, and unstained by civil broil. The father (his name was Saint Clair) pined for his native glen, his feudal tower, his clansmen, and his fallen authority, and died not long after his arrival in Zetland. The beauty of his orphan daughter, despite her Scottish lineage, melted the stout heart 

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