Vulgar words in Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIII (Page 1)
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~ ~ ~ Sentence 110 ~ ~ ~
And so it was here; for Mr. Napier took it into his head that the child was not his, and, in place of being pleased with an heir, he thought himself cursed with a bastard, begotten on his wife by no other than Captain Preston, his lady's cousin.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 217 ~ ~ ~
It was a favourite opinion of some, that the case could only be cleared by supposing that a dead stranger child had been surreptitiously passed off, and even coffined, as the true one; while others, equally skilled in the art of divining, maintained that the child given to Mrs. Hislop by Cowie was a bastard of his own, by the terrible woman Isabel Napier, who was thus, according to the ordinary working of public prejudice, raised to a height of crime sufficient to justify the hatred of the people: on which presumption, it behoved to be assumed that the paper containing the curse was a forgery by Cowie and his associate in crime, and that the money paid to Mrs. Hislop was furnished by the lady; all which suppositions, and others not less incredible, were greedily accepted, for the very reason that it required something prodigious to explain an enigma which exhausted the ordinary sources of man's ingenuity; just as we find in many religions, where miracles--the more absurd, the more acceptable--are resorted to to explain the mystery of man's relation to God, a secret which no natural light can illuminate.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 432 ~ ~ ~
No doubt they did their best to be happy, as all creatures do, even the devil's children, only in a wrong shaft; but they had made that fearful miscalculation, which is the wages of sin, when they counted upon conscience as a pimp to their pleasures, in place of a king's-evidence against them, that king being the Lord of heaven and earth.
~ ~ ~ Sentence 456 ~ ~ ~
They saw that she was moving about as if she were intent upon domestic work; and, by-and-by, there she was busy with coals and sticks brought from their respective places, putting on the fire, which she lighted with the indispensable spunk applied to the spark in the tinder-box.