This Allan Dunlop, though born and bred on a farm, had in him the
spring of a higher and finer life. He was a man of delicate instincts,
refined feelings, and great native sensibility, inherited from his
mother, at whose history we may take a rapid backward glance.
Far away in one of the stately homes of "Merrie England," when the
eighteenth century was old, a gentlewoman, young, charming, and full
of an habitually repressed life and gaiety, waited for her cavalier,
the youthful riding-master who had little to recommend himself to her
gracious kindness save that deep but indefinable charm which a
handsome man on a spirited charger is so prone to exert on the
feminine imagination. The morning was fair, the lady was fairer, and
the heart of her gallant attendant beat faster than the feet of his
steed, as the flying skirt of her robe swept his stirrup, and the soft
length of her mist-like veil blew before his eyes and caressed his
brown cheek. It was not the only mist that blew before his eyes nor
before her's either, poor child! for the rival contrast between this
wild rush over hedge and ditch and bright green meadow and the stiffly
guarded walks and ways of home had spurred her imagination also into a
gallop.
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