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Walks and Wanderings in the World of Literature
Walks and Wanderings in the World of Literature Author:James Grant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE RIVALS; OR, THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A FRIEND. During the last three years I spent at school, two of my class-fellows and I cherished a very warm attachmen... more »t to each other. In almost all our hours of relaxation from study, we contrived to associate together; and always regretted the existence of those circumstances which imposed on us the necessity of even the most temporary separation. It was so ordered, however, in the mysterious appointments of Providence, that I was to be at last parted from my two young friends, for a long period,—it might be for ever. By this time I had received all the education which the comparatively limited finances of my parents could afford to give me, and an excellent situation being offered me in a foreign clime, I at once accepted it; and, after doing the utmostviolence to all the feelings and susceptibilities of my heart, I tore myself from the clinging embraces of friends; abandoned the endeared scenes of my earlier years and all my past happiness ; and repaired to a distant land where I knew no individual, and was known to no one. At this eventful and trying period of my life, I was in my eighteenth year; and even so early as this I was not altogether unacquainted with the workings of what is emphatically designated the tender passion. There was one of the other sex—a young girl, whose personal attractions were only rivalled by her intellectual accomplishments and virtuous disposition, who had made a deep and abiding impression on my heart. She was the daughter of a respectable farmer in the neighbourhood of the village of Ardmore, in the west of Scotland; the place in which my parents and those of my two schoolfellows already referred to, resided. The latter were as intimately acquainted with Matilda Gordon (such was her name) as myself;...« less