hereafter be cast up to my bairns, whom it may please God to restore
to better circumstances when I am no to see't; but I would fain
borrow five pounds, and if, sir, you will write to Mr Maitland, that
is now the Lord Provost of Glasgow, and tell him that Marion Shaw
would be obliged to him for the lend of that soom, I think he will
not fail to send it."

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
stepmother; 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, showed 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."