ABSTRACT
In a rural neighbourhood like that in which I dwelt, the arrival of a solitary stranger such as William did not pass altogether unnoticed. As he wandered about among the fields, the vallies, and the roads, without any discoverable object, various comments were passed on this new phenomenon. A lady, who was on a visit at a few miles distance, who had seen Margaret, and knew something of her history, felt her curiosity excited. She was fortunate enough so far as curiosity was concerned, in one instance to pass near the stranger, so as to make her observations. She saw in him great appearance of dejection, a wild and unsettled air, / and other tokens favourable to her conjecture, that this might be the former lover of Margaret, who was supposed to have been shipwrecked, but respecting whose fate she knew that no particulars had ever been obtained. As William passed her in an opposite direction, she hastened to the cottage, which, as she had been informed, the stranger had frequently chosen as a place to which he resorted, and where he had been known to remain for an hour together. She entered into conversation with the cottagers, asked a multitude of questions respecting the individual who had excited her attention, and learned that one of the principal topics of his conversation was respecting the inmates of the mansion, of whom they were humble dependents. The lady led them in her own train of thinking, and awakened in them recollections which might otherwise have slumbered. They confessed, that the 127stranger had an extremely dejected and disconsolate air, that / they could not account for his having apparently made this spot the centre of his peregrinations, and that he had very much the manner of a man recently arrived from abroad. Persons, who are afflicted with this disease of curiosity, will often be found to have a sort of intuitive faculty, which, though it will sometimes lead them on in a train of conjectures singularly absurd and in a manner impossible, will nevertheless occasionally, as by a sort of felicity, suggest to them inferences, built on very slight grounds, but which nevertheless turn out to be precisely correspondent to the reality of things.
