BEFORE proceeding with this story I must apologize for a striking inaccuracy which it contains. I have represented the educated characters as speaking, but for certain turns of phrase, the ordinary English which is now universal. But, in Scotland, in the very early nineteenth century, gentle and simple alike kept a national distinction of language, and remnants of it lingered in the conversation, as I remember it, of the two venerable and unique old ladies from whom the characters of Miss Hersey Robertson and her sister are taken. They called it ‘Court Scots.’
For the assistance of that tender person, the General Reader, I have ignored it.
V. J.
1903.