due to that of a superior being, but in which he now only read
hatred and contempt, and had got clear of the throng, he could not
help turning his horse, and looking back to mark the progress of
their march. The group would have been an excellent subject for
the pencil of Calotte. The van had already reached a small and
stunted thicket, which was at the bottom of the hill, and which
gradually hid the line of march until the last stragglers
disappeared.

His sensations were bitter enough. The race, it is true, which he
had thus summarily dismissed from their ancient place of refuge,
was idle and vicious; but had he endeavoured to render them
otherwise? They were not more irregular characters now than they
had been while they were admitted to consider themselves as a sort
of subordinate dependents of his family; and ought the mere
circumstance of his becoming a magistrate to have made at once
such a change in his conduct towards them? Some means of
reformation ought at least to have been tried before sending seven
families at once upon the wide world, and depriving them of a
degree of countenance which withheld them at least from atrocious
guilt. There was also a natural yearning of heart on parting with
so many known and familiar faces; and to this feeling Godfrey
Bertram was peculiarly accessible, from the limited qualities of
his mind, which sought its principal amusements among the petty
objects around him. As he was about to turn his horse's head to
pursue his journey, Meg Merrilies, who had lagged behind the
troop, unexpectedly presented herself.

She was standing upon one of those high precipitous banks which,
as we before noticed, overhung the road, so that she was placed