The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

Wilson’s
Tales of the Borders
AND OF SCOTLAND.

HISTORICAL, TRADITIONARY, & IMAGINATIVE,

WITH A GLOSSARY.

REVISED BY

ALEXANDER LEIGHTON,

One of the Original Editors and Contributors.

VOL. XIX.

LONDON:

WALTER SCOTT, 14 PATERNOSTER SQUARE,

AND NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE.

1884.

[CONTENTS.]

WILSON’S

TALES OF THE BORDERS,

AND OF SCOTLAND.

THE DOMESTIC GRIEFS OF GUSTAVUS M’IVER.

CHAPTER I.
GUSTAVUS’S ANTECEDENTS.

In a little house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, there lived, not very long ago, Mr Gustavus M’Iver—(for he never would allow himself to be called Ensign M’Iver, though that was his proper professional designation),—as good a man as ever God put breath in, and as faithful a soldier as ever Lord Wellington commanded in the Peninsula. That is, doubtless, no small praise to one conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity; and heaven knows if it were not as true as Jove’s oath, it would never have been awarded by us. But he was remarkable in other respects than being honest; for he was six feet five without the aid of sock or buskin; and, if any man were to say that he was not four feet from acromion to acromion, he would assuredly be a big liar. But it is the head and face of a man that we like to look at; for, after all, what signifies (except in a warlike view, and ours is a peaceable one) a cart-load of mere bone and muscle, bound together with thick whangs of gristle, and yielding nothing but brute force, if it be not surmounted by a good microcosm of a head, with a good dial-plate to let a man know what is going on within. Do we not see every day great clocks put on the tops of big steeples, and yet, though they are nearer the sun than the little time-piece with the deuce a body at all, they go like an intermitting fever, telling us at one time that we are hurrying to the grave, and at another, that time has nothing to do with us at all. So is it with men; and, for our part, we could never discover any proper legitimate sympathetic accordance between the trunk and cranium of mortals, any more than if (like pins) they had been made in pieces and one head clapped on a body just as the occipital condyles suited the straps to which they are attached.

The opinion now expressed is well justified by the example of the subject of our story; for, while the big limbs of him seemed to set at defiance all regular laws of motion, either horizontal or perpendicular, going, as one might say without a paradox, wherever and however they choose, his head was as methodical as that of a drill sergeant, and the like of him for regularity might not be seen from Lerwick to Berwick. Nor was his face ever known to be at fault as a faithful indicator; and verily there was no great wonder in that, for nothing short of the pulleys he carried in his brain could ever have moved a single hair-breadth up or down, to the right or to the left, the big jaw-bone which he seldom condescended to impart any living motion to, except at meal times, or when (and that occurred very seldom) he had an idea to express sufficient in size and importance to warrant such an excess of labour.

We have said that Gustavus M’Iver had been in the Peninsula; and we may be believed or not, just as suits the reader’s credulity with our credibility; but he was a luckless wight who dared to doubt that fact in the personal presence of the hero himself; better by far he had been at St Sebastian, for the never a one we ever heard of, that had the temerity to express any scepticism on the point that did not live to repent it. There can be no doubt, however, on the subject; for Gustavus was not only in the Peninsula, but he fought there very well; and no great thanks to him either, for he had the entire charge of the mess—a post of honour he had acquired from an indisputable superiority in culinary lore, and a most indefatigable perseverance as well as an unexampled adroitness in the art of carving both for himself and others. The praise he got for fighting was, in so far as regarded the immense heaps of hungry Frenchmen he hewed down with his falchion, true enough; the bulletin writer recorded the fact just as it was reported to him, that the great Goliath Gustavus did actually perform very wonderful feats of sheer killing; and we cannot help thinking, notwithstanding of the sneers of his brother officers, that it would not have become the dignity of a despatch to have made any allusion whatever to the manner in which he had kept up his body and his courage.

When the war was done, he came home filled with glory; and as, when the world speaks of a man, it is unnecessary for him to speak of himself, he seldom (for he was a sensible man) ever thought of speaking either of himself or any other person or thing. Conceit is the foundation of speech; where a man is filled to the very throat with glory, there is little occasion for him ever opening his mouth; and therefore it was that Gustavus, in addition to his other peculiarities, seldom deigned to hold converse with the creatures of the earth, unless it were in his capacity of paymaster of pensions (an office his prowess had secured to him), when he was compelled to speak, to make others hold their tongues—an operation in which he succeeded to a miracle, from the accumulated load of authority he derived from his silence.

CHAPTER II.
GUSTAVUS FALLS IN LOVE.

Now, it happened that this same Gustavus, after almost all the sap of his body had been eliminated by fighting, and there seemed to be scarcely enough left to lubricate the muscles that stretched from promontory to point of his big bones, like tough hausers, took it into his head to wish for a wife. We doubt if all the physiologists or psychologists that ever hunted for traces of the spirit among the white guts of the head could tell how such an idea came into such an extraordinary place; and if his heart was as dry as the voluntary muscles of his body, nothing short of a dislocation of Cupid’s right arm could ever have sent into such a leathery organ the tickling shaft. True, however, it is as death, that Gustavus did actually fall in love, and the symptoms were just as extraordinary as the passion itself; for there never was heard in any man’s lungs before, such a rattle of sighs; and as for the length of his jaws, the never a rough wood-cut of John Bunyan’s hero in the Slough of Despond could come within many degrees of their lugubrious longitude. It is even true that the power of the tender passion reached to his stomach—a place of all others that might a priori have been considered perfectly independent of all moral impulses whatsomever. Nothing before, except hunger itself, had ever affected that organ; and, indeed, ensconced behind and between, and beneath such ribs, nothing short of death itself might have been supposed capable of reaching it, or subduing its tough hide, its viscous linings, and its gastric juice, stronger than the best gin that ever was made at Schiedam.

Now the petit bel chose that had thus produced such an effect upon the moral and physical economy of this big son of Mars, was no other than a mere toy of a thing—a little milliner called Julia Briggs—scarcely so big, when divested of the padding and stuffing with which her art enabled her to supply her deficiency of natural size, as one of his huge limbs. But this may be no manner of marvel to those who are versant in the mysteries of love, who, being himself a small creature, seems to delight in throwing into the smallest of his victims the greatest portion of his power. It is difficult to see philosophically any final cause in the curious fact in nature; but surely, the never a man, who has any observation in him, will deny, that pigmy beauties and colossal swains (and vice versa) have a singular power of producing in each other the tender passion. It may be owing to nature’s love of the juste milieu, that thus induces her to take this mode of keeping up a reasonable mean size among human creatures, or it may be any one of a thousand other speculations; but what care we for such theories, when we have the fact to state as an undoubted truth, that Gustavus fell in love with Julia Briggs, as standing like a mighty Anak, in the Canongate of Edinburgh, he saw the little creature skipping along, twisting her little limbs as if she would have dislocated her joints in her efforts to appear graceful, in the eyes of mankind generally, and in those of the gigantic Gustavus, whom she had often seen looking after her, in particular! Successful beyond any prior example of her wriggling evolution of her graces, the little baggage—as quick in her eye as ever were Pip, Trip, or Skip, the maids of honour (according to Drayton) of Queen Mab—saw at once that she had hit the proper twirl and twinkle, at last, that would subdue the involuntary muscle that had so long been useless beneath the ribs of the great Gustavus. The moment the effect was produced, the sinews of his body began to move, and away he stalked after her, with strides as long as the whole height a capite ad calcem of the quarry upon which he intended to pounce. It spoke well of the power of “her harness of gossamer,” that it stood the tug of so huge a victim; and, as she turned her twinkling eye to observe the triumph of her power, she did not fail to rivet the chains by some higher displays of graceful contortion, that made his eyeballs roll in the large sockets, as if he had seen a hobgoblin, in place of Julia Briggs, the petite marchande de modes.

This was just as good a beginning as ever a sly man-catcher essayed in the world of love, since the days of Helen; and the arch kidnapper knew very well how to follow up her wile; for, after displaying, by a proper caper, as much of her ancle as would do the business, she skipped away, as nimbly as Nymphidia in the service of Oberon’s queen, and was not again seen till she opened the window of her mother’s house, and displayed herself, capless and coifless, to her staring admirer. The capture was now completed. Jove himself was never more completely entoiled by the chains of the little baggage Iynge; and, during the whole of that day, Gustavus strode along the pavement, opposite the window of his charmer, as if he had been on duty before a besieged city. He had just as little power to walk away as he had to circumscribe his step to the ordinary measure of God’s creatures; every stride occupying, at least, four feet of pavement, and being executed so regularly and methodically, that one step did not differ from another by a single inch. But it is a mere bagatelle to describe these pendulous movements, produced, for the first time, by the spirit of love; while, to execute with truth a faithful picture of the painful contortions of a countenance originally formed a wood-cut of extraordinary dimensions, and now under the soft, melting influence of the tenderest of passions, would require a goose-quill, owning no less an influence than the spirit of an immortal genius. As the loves of some of the inferior animals are expressed by sounds and signs that seem to indicate nothing but fierce war, so might the demonstrations of this extraordinary affair of the heart, exhibited through the grotesque motions of muscles that had been as rigid as dried leather for twenty years, be looked upon as anything rather than signs of the languishing passion which, as Augustin says, will make a musician out of an ass. Yet, doubtless, there was, both in his goggle-eyes and lengthened face, an expression that was intended for softness and languishment; and it is not impossible, that, if one had been apprized a priori of the intention, he might have discovered in the ludicrous gesticulations some resemblance to at least a burlesque of what is only a very ridiculous exhibition at the very best.

Love that is long a-coming, comes at last with a terrible onset—overturning all sense and prudence, kicking up the heels of all forms of etiquette, and removing every impediment to its progress. It is but a very small matter to say, that Gustavus could not sleep under the hug or embrace of the new customer that had taken such a violent hold of his heart, though we do not deem it an equally insignificant announcement, that a man who could swallow a couple of pounds of flesh at a down-sitting, should lose his gustative and digestive powers to such an extent that the knocking of his heart sounded audibly through his empty stomach, as if it had been a whispering gallery. But love is a leveller in more senses than the vulgar one; and the only circumstance about the matter of this particular case at all remarkable, was, that such effects, upon a body iron-bound as it was, and of such gigantic proportions, should have been produced by an agent of such truly insignificant dimensions. A resolute disciplinarian, however, at all points, without a single qualm of fear or doubt, and accustomed to attack a city or a haunch of beef with equal sang froid, the love-smitten victim, on the third day after his seizure, drew up his huge limbs to their full extent, till he seemed like the Colossus of Rhodes, and settled the whole affair by one resolute gnash of his under maxillary bone. Two strides took him to the door, one or two more brought him down stairs to the street, and the never a man that stalked off ground that was to be his own, went along with such strides as he used in making his way to the house of Julia Briggs. With one solitary idea in his head, and one word on his tongue—though there was room for a thousand—he went direct up to the door, knocked, like one of Froissard’s warriors at the barricades, was admitted, turned off the momentous question of marriage by one heavy lurch of his jaw, and settled a matter that danglers take years about in the space of time that a thirsty Bacchanalian would occupy in taking a long pull of jolly good ale.

CHAPTER III.
GUSTAVUS IS MARRIED.

In the week afterwards, the couple were united in the holy bands of matrimony; and, surely, to say that there was any ceremony about such a union, would be a burlesque of the mysteries of Hymen. Yet, rapid as were the movements, and wholesale the conclusion, no man ever put his neck in the noose with such imperturbable gravity, for, during the whole period occupied by the feast, which was in the form of a supper, no man could have observed in his gaunt face any one of the three laughs, Ionic, Megaric, or Sardonic, with which the face is usually convulsed; the only indication approaching to a cachination in the midst of the whoops and yells of the feasters, being a grin in the shape of a risus Ajacis, that defied all power of analysis. But even this caricature of a display of good humour, insignificant as it may seem, shewed to those who knew the man that he was labouring under the influence of some extraordinary emotion, as nothing of the kind had ever been seen in his countenance since the day on which he hewed down so unmercifully the French at St Sebastian. Nor, on the following day, when he had fairly entered upon the supreme happiness of the married state, was there seen any palpable sign of the joy that, of course, penetrated through all his well-mailed thoracic viscera—unless it were, perhaps, that his face had even increased in length, and the leathery aspect of all the “celestial index” of the soul was, if possible, more grim than ever.

The getting of a wife is, after all, but a very small matter in comparison of the ruling of her; and sure, if ever there was a man in the world, since the days of the grim Hercules, who bungled the matter out and out, that had any chance of subjecting his wife to the requisite thraldom and subordination, Gustavus was that man; for a look of him was enough to tame a Bucephalus any day; and it was evident that he cogitated mighty achievements in that way, if one might have judged from the marshalling character of his step as he paraded the house; his taciturnity, deeper than the wells of truth; and the air of a resolute importance that was enthroned among the deep furrows of his extraordinary countenance. The first fruits of his study—and verily he must have been a man of no common nerve that could study during the honeymoon—was the important conclusion, that the sooner his Julia was entoiled in the multifarious affairs of domestic economy, and the imperative duties of ministering to his every want and comfort, the better chance he enjoyed of subjecting her thoroughly to the power of his stern discipline. So straight began he, accordingly, upon the instant, and, by the aid of a small douceur, got quit of his servant—an act that savoured of extraordinary sagacity and wisdom, in so much as it involved the additional advantages of saving her wages, and keeping and turning his wife into a source of profit, as she would doubtless be the fountain of much delectation. It is not unlikely that the maxim, when the devil finds a man or woman idle, he straightway sets them aworking—or, as Erasmus expresses it, Ocium ad omnem nequitiam impellit—had a large share in this determination; for, as to the opinion of Shakspeare, that idleness is the source of love, he despised it hepatically, and calculated with certainty that love’s sweetest labour—the contributing to the comfort of her lord—would be diligently pursued by his beloved and most adorable Julia Briggs.

All this was just as fair a piece of human calculation, and as probable a conclusion, as could ever be found beyond the regions of pure mathematics; and so, placing every fibre of his big body, excepting some portion of the heart, under the rigid authority of the genius of command, he issued, with an air a deuced deal more martial than marital, his stern orders, which were as recondite as they were energetic—going into the very medullary penetralia of the matter of cooking and housekeeping with a knowledge and consideration that would have done honour to Mrs Margaret Dods of the Cleikum Inn herself. Nor was this to be much wondered at; for, had he himself not washed and dressed in the Peninsula, and had he not there also foraged, and cooked, and swallowed as no bon vivan ever did before, since the days of the three Apicii? The never a man had ever doubted it; and if he had, it would just have been as safe for the unhappy wretch to have disputed his courage as to have expressed one word of scepticism on a subject that so nearly concerned his honour—for, in either case, he would have been knocked down.

It would be a libel on womankind to say, that the polite Julia, who had been a standing toast among the small men of fashion connected with the depots of millinery wares about the town, had any affection for the bare-boned Colossus she had wedded on a week’s notice; and it would have been an insult to her spirit to have said that she feared him, though he was at least three times the size of any of her former lovers. She had married him, as all women of her stamp do, just for a living and protection—the one to be afforded from his pay, and the other from his bones and sinews—a very fair calculation for a woman of so small a calibre to make; and, accordingly, she would have declared war against him at once, big and terrible as he was, if she could have seen any good to come of it; for, as to the fearful expression of his leather-bound jaws, when he issued the order for work, she cared no more for it than if it had been a smile of mawkish love-doting. It is not likely that she had ever heard of Omphale, who ruled the biggest man of the world by her slipper; but she had not thrown away the needle, which had been used on the linens of fair, personable men, to take it up again to sew for a husband that never was intended by nature to be loved; and, as for supplying its place with the spit, she looked upon the proposition with as much contempt as she would have bestowed on a proposal that she should love the gigantic caricature she had married for nothing else in the world but her own convenience. All that was as plain as noon-day; but open war was not her tact, any more than it is the tact of Puck to fight the regular Goliaths of the earth at a fair stand-up or monomachy; and it is scarcely necessary to say, that the open duellum is no more relished by the women of her class generally, than it was by the “eel or deil” of a creature that Gustavus had raised to the high station of his wife. Nor had she any difficulty in fixing on her plans; for nature was just as kind to her as to the rest of her sex in suggesting the means of perplexing her lord, though it is not improbable that, if she had known that his intention in making her work was to keep her out of all that species of devilry that comes to women out of idleness, she might have been inclined to vindicate the nobility of her kind, by some more devilish trick than mere unaided nature might at first have prompted.

The sharp, vixen eye of the pigmy sempstress had not been slow in perceiving that the two grand sine quibus non of her husband’s comfort, were pure linens and well-cooked victuals; and she knew, moreover—doubtless in the way by which the sex come to their secret knowledge of men’s ways—that he had been in the habit of securing these grand objects by the labour of his own hands. The antipodes of each other in everything, they were as unlike each other in respect of these domestic duties, as they were in the sizes of their bodies; for while, as has been already hinted, there never was a man since the days of Pope Joan that excelled more in the mysteries of washing, dressing, and cooking than Gustavus, there never was a woman that knew less of these recondite arts than Mrs Julia M’Iver. The sexes of the two should, therefore, clearly have been reversed—he should have been the wife, and she the husband; and Julia knew this just as well as we or any other individual who presumes to question the excellence of the laws that regulate matrimonial matches, when she resolved to bring about a state of matters that would just be the same as if the potentiality we have mentioned had just in fact been a reality. She accordingly began by spoiling every piece of domestic labour to which she applied her hands; his linens being as much of the tint of saffron as ever were those of a gareteer, who enjoys the luxury of a pole and rope put forth from a skylight; and his victuals as wretchedly dressed as ever a devil-sent cook in the kingdom could have mangled out of the fair gifts of nature. Nothing in the way of destruction could have been more skilfully managed; and it is not too much to say, that, though the fair Julia had lifted her delicate hand, and attempted to knock him down, or performed any of the other culpæ gravissimæ that appertain to the privileges of the sex, she could not have more effectually roused the wrath, of the mighty Gustavus.

CHAPTER IV.
GASTAVUS BECOMES HOUSEWIFE—AND JULIA UNDERGOES A CHANGE.

Had Gustavus been a reasonable man, he might have begun supplying, in a rational way, the deficiency of domestic lore which his Julia thus lamentably discovered; but, unfortunately, his pride of the perfectibility of his own knowledge of these occult mysteries was called in question at the very time that his anger was roused by a fault the most heinous of any beyond the pale of the decalogue. With a look of terrible scorn, in which, all the gristly muscles of his grim face were called into a grotesque, convulsive motion, he announced, in as much of a paucity of vocables, and as loud a sound as ever the stentorian Cycloborus, expressed his settled determination to take the sovereignty of the kitchen on his own shoulders; and no one could have heard the sound and seen his countenance without believing that it was just as sure as death or sin that he would do as he said he would do. At least, there can be no manner of doubt that Mrs Julia M’Iver believed him, and it was equally doubtless that she did not fear him. She smiled at the success of her scheme, and the smile itself would have done the business of confirmations, if there had been any need of such aid in the matter. So, accordingly, the apparition was soon afterwards exhibited, of the great bibbed Gustavus striding about in the kitchen, and performing manibus suis all the operations of the culinary department of his domestic economy; and we would tell a big untruth, or be guilty of misprision itself, if we attempted to conceal the fact, that he washed and dressed his own linens as well as, if not a deuced deal better, than any washerwoman that ever danced in a trough in the village of Duddingstone.

When Hercules laid down his club, and took off his lion’s skin, and received from the hands of his mistress the spindle and distaff, the big warrior did no more than many a better man has done when he resigns himself to the dominion of love; but no love on earth would ever have made Gustavus M’Iver take upon himself the duties of a woman. He did it from a sheer love of good eating and clean linens—ay, and he persevered in it too, though he saw, as plain as palpable physics, that (what he dreaded) his petite Julia would become a prey to the harpies of indolence. And, to be sure, the ordinary consequences very soon began to shew themselves; for where there was no love and no work to occupy the mind, and plenty of well-dressed victuals to fill the stomach, Mrs M’Iver was, in every respect, a lady at large, and, a lady at large being synonymous with a lady in danger, she fell into habits of going abroad, and calling, and gossiping, and sipping, and tasting, till she became as big a drunkard as ever was seen out of the county town of Horrestia. Yet, still true to her character, she feared Gustavus nothing—no more than she did the good whisky which she swallowed in choppins; and this fortitude made the mischief ten times greater than it would otherwise have been; for, terror being the fulcrum of law and amendment, there might have been some hope of her if she had not ensconced herself behind the noblest of all the cardinal virtues—true blue courage. Though a petite marchande de modes, and unable or unwilling to cook a dinner or dress a shirt, Mrs Julia M’Iver knew the rights of her sex just as well as the “guid wife of Auchtermuchty” herself—she knew that Gustavus had no right to turn her away without supporting her, and he could not beat her without subjecting himself to the horn of a summons of separation and aliment; so, upon the whole, she had grounds for her fearlessness, which would have supported her though she had had never a particle of true heroism from the mother of every one of us.

Few women whom fame has immortalized, have done so much as was achieved by this little heroine; for she had already made a giant her cook and servant, and now she forced him to become her nurse, when she chose to be sick from the effects of intemperance. A more complete reversal of all the reciprocal duties of husband and wife, had never been achieved by woman; and it was in vain that Gustavus looked more grim and gaunt than ever—that he even condescended to argue upon the subject—a thing he had never before done in his life, and of which, in truth, he was deemed totally incapable. He still loved the wicked imp, and she knew he loved her—and what more was required to account for the fearless perverseness on the one side, and the submission on the other? But what was he now to do? It was comparatively mere pastime to cook or to wash, or even to nurse the sick Julia, when her illness overcame his resentment; but the thought that the grand qualities and faculties of a man who had commanded and killed in his day, and whose very look spread terror around him, were to be brought down to subserve the mere purpose of ministering to one of the smallest of women that ever drew breath, and one of the greatest drunkards that ever drank whisky, was surely enough to make an ordinary man mad. If the difficulty was to be resolved at all, it could be only by cogitation; and so straightway he set about a process of thinking—an operation of marvellous difficulty to him, as might have been manifestly seen by the length of his stride and of his face, as he paced backwards and forwards—his apron, a species of mail he donned every morning before he began his operations, shaking and rattling among his huge limbs like a mainsail in a gale of wind.

And, to be sure, his was not altogether a barren cogitation, as might have been both seen and heard in the loud thunder of his hand on the table, as he muttered his resolution to stop the supplies. He never failed to act upon a thought; for the thing was too difficult to be got, to be lost for want of use, and, accordingly, the supplies were stopped; but what was that to Julia Briggs, so long as he had any credit in the town, or she had any clothes on her back? Julia got intoxicated as regularly as ever she had done before, and demanded imperiously his ministrations as nurse, with the same sang froid, or rather pertness, that formed a part of her cardinal courage. His cogitations had gone for nothing; and again the painful duty of pondering and devising, was forced upon the thick intestines of his gigantic head.

Again he perambulated the house from room to kitchen, sometimes brandishing like a sword a spit or skewer, in the mental absence produced by the effort to think; and he caught at last—what he laboured for—a cure for Julia’s habits of drinking; and he acted upon it again as manfully as before; for he locked her up, and the devil a chum, or gossip, or pot-companion could approach her; but he forgot that there was such an aperture as a window in a house, or a mouth in a woman, and the first thing that assailed his ears was the cry of Julia for constables to give her the liberty that our great country has awarded as a boon to all natural-born subjects of the realm. Nor was so just an appeal vain; for authorities and neighbours interfered in behalf of the prisoner; and Gustavus was told to his teeth that he had not a jot of right to imprison his wife; whereupon she was released, and the evening of the same day saw her, under the effects of the jubilee of her emancipation, more intoxicated than he had yet ever beheld her.

Again was the rusty machinery of his intellect set in motion, and the result was a device that distanced the former experiments, as well for its ingenuity as its chance of success. He had heard of women being satiated with liquor; and so he put in her power ten times more than ever it was in the capability of woman to swallow—an act that was accompanied by something in the shape of an argument, to the effect that, if she became disgusted with it, she would give it up, and if she died of it, the consequence would be the same. The result in the one case would be an achievement that would bring him comparative happiness, and the consequence in the other would, he was now satisfied (such was the misery he had suffered, and was still suffering), be anything but a misfortune. But Julia took no more than was good for her, and thanked Gustavus heartily for his extreme kindness, while every day she applied herself to the big measure; and every night, while the supply lasted, went to bed with the assistance of Gustavus’ own hands.

CHAPTER V.
GUSTAVUS FALLS UPON ANOTHER INGENIOUS DEVICE.

Thus did matters continue for a long period of time; and all the efforts, and threats, and devices of Gustavus had no more effect in preventing Julia from taking her pleasure, than the restraint of a husband generally has over the irregularities of a wife of true courage, who knows her inalienable rights derived from the just laws of a free land. If his brain seemed to be exhausted in devising remedies, his patience fell a victim before his continued wretchedness—and no marvel either, when it is considered that while other men only bring in the means of supporting a drunken wife, whom the equitable and wise ordinances of the country will not allow him to get quit of except for a crime not a tithe so bad as that of Julia M’Iver, he kept her in means, and cooked for and dressed for her, and nursed her, and all the good he got out of her was the liberty of doing these things for her benefit. By a happy chance, however, Gustavus’ brains were not yet exhausted. Space and time he had taken to ruminate upon his evils, and to hit upon one expedient more for the envied cure; and he resolved to carry his Julia off to the country, where, in some secluded cottage, he might exercise such an authority over her as would prevent her from following her usual courses. So accordingly he did just as he had resolved; and, in a small domicile in a part of the north, he took up his habitation, for no other purpose in the world than to cure Julia of her heart-engrained propensity. The place he had chosen seemed the very choicest that could have been found in all Scotland—ay, or England or Ireland either; for there was no house where a gossip might live, or a whisky-vender hang board, for miles; while a carrier that passed daily brought him everything that was necessary for human sustenance; and he himself could cook and wash unseen by the eyes of mortal.

For six weeks was Julia M’Iver as sober as the Chief Justice of England, or the President of the Supreme Court, and it was manifest that never a drop of anything stronger than river water had got beyond her parched lips.

Now, Gustavus triumphed as no man ever triumphed under less than an ovation itself; and Julia was forced to be contented with the limited tyranny of making him continue his domestic duties; for the more sober she was kept, the less she would do, and her time was chiefly occupied in reading novels, which Gustavus was glad to give her as an inadequate surrogation for whisky. But all this was too good to last, though how it should be interrupted, no man with less than the spirit of one Davo versatior could possibly tell. Jove’s greatness is, however, no less true, than the fact that Gustavus came in one night and found, and staggered with perfect amazement as he found, Mrs Julia M’Iver lying on the floor, more perfectly obnubilated, speechless, and senseless, from the effects of the liquid enemy, than he had ever seen her in his life. Yet there was no one near; the carrier had not called for a week; she could not have been absent from the house for more than half-an-hour; and he himself had been out stalking for exercise, and rejoicing in his triumph for no more than three full quarters. The matter seemed a mystery as deep as any that ever was covered by the Eleusinian veil; and having put her to bed, as he had done a thousand times before, he set about an investigation and search through all the premises, which ended in a look of gaunt amazement, and an ineffectual striding backwards and forwards, till he threw himself on a seat, and gave up the task in despair. Nor, after he had nursed her into sobriety, could he make a jot more of the inexplicable subject; for Julia had too much good sense to tell where she got the treasure, and only smiled at him as his heavy lips twisted themselves into a question, where, in the name of the author of all evil himself, she had fallen upon that infernal element.

No light was to be thrown upon the subject from any of the quarters from which evidence could have been looked for, and the circumstance might have remained as one of those mystical wonders that have perplexed mankind from the beginning of the world, and been passed over in despair, if Julia had afterwards remained sober, but she had scarcely recovered, and Gustavus had only begun to hope once more, when she was found again in the same state; and, every two days, or at farthest three, she repeated the habit, till at last she was as bad, if not worse, than she had ever been in the midst of dram shops in the city of Edinburgh. Never a word of explanation would she give on the subject; the carrier was watched, and found to deposit nothing; the inhabitants at the distance of miles were interrogated in vain; the house was again searched—no one had been seen to call, and all was as obscure as the numbers of Pythagoras, the Bæotic enigma, or the poems of Carcinus; the deuce a beam of light could Gustavus get for love or money, to clear up the dark mystery.

CHAPTER VI.
GUSTAVUS IS MYSTIFIED, AND RESOLVES ON A SCHEME PERFECTLY ORIGINAL.

He had now retreated from a bad position to one a mighty deal worse; for, in the midst of a town, he could sometimes see a friend, and smoke a pipe, in the fumes of which all his cares were, for a time, enveloped, and kept from the eyes of his haunted fancy; but now, in the midst of a comparative wilderness, he had no associate, but that very limb of Satan herself, that was the source and origin of the misery to which he was enslaved. He was, besides, rolled up in a cloud of mystery, in which the wicked enchantress sat and mocked him, like some of those eastern genii, that love to look and speak through thick vapours which increase the mystic character of their power. Still she contrived to get intoxicated; and, so vain had been his efforts to trace the source of the evil, that he verily believed the imp was possessed of some charm whereby she realized a compact with the enemy of mankind. If he went out to stalk round the house and brood over his misfortunes, he found that she had, in the meantime, got herself made perfect in insensibility; and if she, by any means, got to a short distance from the house unobserved, she returned in a condition no less lamentable. It was a big, crying evil, fronted with shame, and adminicled with devilries of every degree and colour that ever came from the box of Pandora. It was impossible that man could stand it; and necessity, the mother of invention, stung the obtuse brain of Gustavus to something like the ingenium perfervidum of genius itself. He knew very well that he had terrified men; and, indeed, as love is said to be inspired by a look, so one glance of him was, of a surety, sufficient to have produced fear in any one but Julia, who valued his fierce looks no more than if they had been smiles. But he could do more than look—he could threaten; and the question that troubled him, for a time, was, what he should threaten; for he had made up his mind to terrify her in some way; and the sheer necessity of projecting something worthy of himself, was the parent of one of the most extraordinary expedients that ever came from the brain of genius.

The expedient was this: He told her, with a big oath, and a face at which the walls of St Sebastian might have trembled to their foundations, that, the first time he found her intoxicated, he would put her in a coffin, and actually bury her in the earth, as deep and sure as ever Jonah was buried in the belly of the biggest monster of the deep. Nor was the threat a sheer gust of breath, for he immediately set about making a real coffin—a performance which he executed very well, painting it as black as fashion requires, and studding it with a goodly portion of white buttons, which he tore from a mass of old regimentals; and, having finished it, he placed it in his bedroom, as a grim indication of the reality of his intentions. But the woman who could defy the terrors of such a face as that of Gustavus M’Iver, had nothing to fear from the sight of a coffin; and so, of a surety, it turned out—for the determined baggage not only laughed broad in his countenance, but told him to it, that, so long as he was cowardly enough to have any fear of the gallows, she had not a jot of reason to be afraid of being buried alive.

Both parties, in this way, seemed equally determined. Gustavus took his usual mighty strides along the room, and set the pulleys of his facial muscles in rapid play; and Julia, the pert minx, indulged in her laughing mockery, that seemed to set him and his coffin at defiance. That she was as serious as Socrates in her disbelief of his intentions, was very soon made manifest—for the coffin had not been three days old, when she got as drunk as Midas; and that he was apparently as determined as Draed, he very soon gave suitable demonstrations—for, in place of lifting her into bed according to his usual practice, he placed her into the grim chest, and, putting a mattock on the top of it, he hoisted it on his shoulders, and strode away forth to a wood as dark as the recesses of the Cumæan witch, that stood at some distance from his habitation. There, as good fortune would have it, he found, already dug to his hand, a deep hole, round the edges of which grew a profusion of bushes and furze, sufficient to make the pit as grim and frightful as the very grave itself; and there, having deposited his charge, with plenty of room for breath through the holes he had made in the lid, he turned him round, and stalked away home to cook his dinner.

CHAPTER VII.
JULIA GETS INTO A PLEASANT PANDEMONIUM.

Now, it happened that honest Angus M’Guire and Donald M’Nair, two brawny Highlanders, were that day busily occupied in distilling a drop of good whisky, in a subterraneous distillery, to which the hole wherein Gustavus had laid his wife, led by a covered and concealed passage; and it was in no other than this very place that Julia had been so plentifully supplied with the liquor by which she was so often inebriated. Sitting by the mouth of the worm or serpent, which gave forth drop by drop the poison, stronger and more hurtful than ever came from the mouth of the Snake of Lerna, they heard a strange noise on the ground over their heads, as Gustavus was busy about the details of his interment, and shook with unfeigned terror, as if they had been on the point of being discovered in their illicit operations. By and by they heard a rumbling in the mouth of the cavern, as if some one had been in the act of descending, and, rising and seizing each a pistol and a sword, they stood on the defensive, prepared to slay the first gauger that should set his face into their subterraneous dominions. But the never an exciseman appeared: in place of that, to them, most fearful of all mortal beings, they saw the identical coffin in which Julia M’Iver had been laid, fall with a heavy sound upon the floor of their dark habitation.

Terror-struck, twenty times more than if they had seen the ghost of a murdered exciseman, they stood with their hair forcing up their bonnets on their head, and stared till their eyes seemed ready to burst from the sockets, at the dreadful object of their fears. A faint light glimmered through the cave, and was reflected from the rows of white buttons with which the black vision was studded; and all the horrid features of the grim apparition were displayed by that kind of dim light by which they could be seen to advantage. They could speak not a word to each other; and their mutual looks excited by sympathy a greater mutual fear than ever; and so they still stood and looked, and wondered, and would have moved their bodies to take a closer survey, but could not for very nervousness—albeit any one of them would have knocked a gauger on the head in an instant. But it was clear, even to themselves, that they could not thus stand staring at a coffin for ever; and it is not unlikely that this prospective impossibility supplied the place of courage; and so, Donald being the less timid of the two, gradually approached and surveyed their extraordinary visiter. Beckoning his friend Angus forward, he proceeded to force open the lid.

“The corpse o’ Julia M’Iver, our goot customer,” said he, “as sure as my name’s Tonald M’Nair!” And Angus, bending his head down, and holding his hands up, acknowledged the apparent truth. “Murtered py Custaphus, py Cot!” added he, “and puried here to hide the plack, purning shame!”

And they sat down by the coffin, and stared at each other and at the dead beauty, lost in deep cogitation as to what they should do. Their thoughts both took the same direction.

“What is to pe done?” muttered they both at the same instant.

“We cannot inform, and we cannot take the pody to Custaphus,” again said Donald; “for that would tiscover us.”

“To pe surely na,” said Angus; “put we can pury her, cannot we, Tonald?”

“Ay, that we can,” answered the latter; “and that we will, too, as surely as my grandmother was puried in the houf o’ Kepplemechan.”

“Ay, or as mine was puried in Fochapers kirkyard,” rejoined Angus; “but we maun let the nicht fa’ first, or it may pe said that we were the murterers o’ the puir cratur. Ochone! put this is a tam pad world. We maun hae a quaich to keep up oor courage.”

And so they set about preparing themselves for the work they had in prospect, by drinking of their own spirits by the side of the coffin; every now and then looking in the face of Julia, and lamenting the unhappy fate of their former visiter, with whom they had drunk many a good bumper, and enjoyed much good fun and frolic.

In this occupation, and exchanging many a comely sentiment on the wickedness of man, and the shortness and uncertainty of human life, they passed several hours, until it should be dark enough for the purpose of interring Julia in reality, which they would execute as surely as ever mortal was consigned to dust. They had drunk till their eyes began to reel in their heads, and till tears of mawkish and drunken sentimentality were dropping on the face of their merry boon companion, as she lay in her bier. A toast of exquisite pathos—“Here’s to the good cratur’s soul then!” had just escaped from Donald’s lips, when Julia opened her eyes, and, altogether unconscious where she lay, obeyed the first impulse of her wakening heart, by holding out her hand, and asking for a glass of the whisky which she saw them drinking with so much good will. Twenty ghosts in their winding sheets could not have produced a greater sensation; for the two Highlanders threw from them their quaichs, and, starting to their feet, flew, with a scream of terror that might have been heard upon the surface of the earth itself, into the farthest recesses of the dark abode.

“Heaven pe merciful to us!” they both muttered, as they crouched down beside the stove, and eyed fearfully the moving corpse, through the dim light that came from the half-concealed fire; and their fears had a small chance of being removed or alleviated by what they farther heard and saw; for, as they watched and trembled, they witnessed the rising terrors of Julia herself, who, looking around her, and seeing herself placed in the coffin, had never a shadow of doubt that she was actually buried, and that she was in the region appointed for the wicked daughters of men. She began to groan piteously; and, being yet only half sober, mixed up her thoughts of the lower regions with the feelings she cherished on earth, in such a grotesque manner, that it would have been impossible for an ordinary person to have heard her without at once trembling and laughing.

“And am I, of a surety, here at the long run,” she muttered, “among devils and devils’ dams, who will have never a qualm of mercy for me any more than they have for their other victims, who have broken the laws of the upper world?” And, sighing as deep as her stomach, she paused and again soliloquised:—“But did I not see my good friends, Angus M’Guire and Donald M’Nair, drinking by my side, even at this moment? There cannot be a doubt on’t, and they will be dead and damned too for a certainty; but, faith, I care not if I should be here after all, if I fare as they were faring even now, when I saw them with the quaichs in their very hands, as I have seen before in the distillery in the wood of Balmaclallan, so often when I was in the body. Ho! there! Donald M’Nair, it is no other than Julia Briggs that calls you, and she is as thirsty as fire can make her.”

The truth now began to dawn on the minds of the Highlanders. “She is no more tead than I am, or any living pody,” cried Donald, as he began to move from his dark hole. “I am coming, my tarling Julia; and, py te Holy Virgin, you shall not want what ye are now asking for!” And, pulling Angus along with him, he again approached the coffin, where he saw his old friend looking up from her prostrate position with a pair of as clear eyes as whisky ever illuminated. “Are ye tead or living, Julia?” cried Angus.

“I cannot tell you till I get a quaich,” answered Julia; and the medicine was on the instant administered by Donald, when all doubt on the mysterious subject having been dispelled, her friends lifted her from the coffin, and they set to work after their usual manner, which was no other than indulging in numerous potations. The recollection of Gustavus’s threat enabled her to explain everything; and as they sat carousing and singing in great glee, they laughed heartily at the circumstance of Gustavus having buried his wife in a distillery, with the view of curing her of a love of whisky.

CHAPTER VIII.
GUSTAVUS GETS INTO TROUBLE AND OUT OF IT.

While they were thus as happy as drink and frolic could make any of the sons or daughters of Adam, Gustavus was meditating on the probable effects of his extraordinary remedy for drunkenness, and enjoying already the triumph he anticipated, as the fruits of his ingenuity. He had cooked for himself a good dinner, and, being thus also in good spirits, he counted the hours as they passed, every moment of which was worth to him a grain of gold, in so far as they would purchase a relief from the thraldom and misery in which he had been so long held. He had given her four hours of the grave, and the increasing length of his stride seemed to indicate that he was fast approaching some resolution, which was probably to go and see how his Julia was faring in her dark habitation. He had left the ropes by which she had been let down, in such a position that he could draw her out again with the greatest certainty, so that he was perfectly at ease on the score of her ultimate safety; but all his efforts, he knew, would be worse than endeavouring to make iron swim, to hold an eel by the tail, to dissect cheese mites, or make a cod warble, or any other opera inanis, if she were taken out before she awoke and experienced all the terrors of her situation. He therefore gave her an hour or two more, and then sallied forth as grim as Hercules when he went a bull-baiting, to reconnoitre, and ascertain if any indications of her being awake came from the grave (as he expected it would be) of her bad habits and the womb of her regeneration. A very few movements of his immense limbs brought him to the spot; but not an inch of the rope he could find; and, though he pulled aside the bushes, and stared with goggle eyes into the pit, not a glimpse of the coffin could he discover. The affair was marvellous and unfathomable as the wells of Agamemnon; and he stood and stared with mute wonder, at what appeared to be nothing else in the world than bewitched devilry. He looked around him to see if he could find any traces of either the coffin or Julia Briggs; but all was still and hazy, and nothing could he see or hear; so he tried the pit again, and, to search the bottom of it, he took a long stick from a neighbouring tree, and plunged it in, and groped, and sounded; but it was clear that he never struck on wood, nor indeed upon anything but the soft brush stuff with which the Highlanders had again closed up the aperture. He even descended into the hole, as far as he could reach his limbs, while he held on by the bushy side; and he thus ascertained to a dead certainty that the never a bit of a coffin was there, or indeed anything but furze, among which his feet became entangled. Having got out again with difficulty, he fell to roaring and shouting—“Julia M’Iver! Julia M’Iver!” But no answer was returned, save by the echoing wood, which mocked him like the American bird of many voices that laughs at the eloquence of man. No other conclusion could he come to, but that Julia, coffin and all, had been carried off by the prime minister of Oberon, or some other power, that had determined to punish her for her intemperance, or him for his cruelty; and his former love returning, now that he had, perhaps for ever, lost the object of it, he grew frantic as the lover of Briseis, and stamped and strode about the wood, accusing himself as the murderer of his wife, and trembling for his neck, which he had put in a position of jeopardy. To add to his terrors, he sometimes thought he heard strange shouts of mirth, coming from under the ground; and his mind still straying to the land of the court of the pigmy king, he fancied that the thieves were rejoicing in their subterranean abodes, over the triumph they had achieved over a mortal creature. The strength or weakness of superstition has nothing to do with the size of the bones, or the strength of thews and sinews of the individuals over whom it exercises its control; and there was no marvel at all that Gustavus felt undefined terrors laying hold of him, as the darkness of the night increased, and the blackness of the mystery enveloped his brain. He had faced cannon in his day, and hewn down warriors as gigantic as himself without a qualm; but that was no reason why he should not quail before the powers of infernal or subterranean agency; and so to be sure it was well proved by what followed; for he marched home as if he had been on a retreat, with, perhaps, more ideas in his head than ever could have been supposed to find an entry into the impenetrable fortress which, in spite of rockets, he had so long carried on his shoulders.

He passed the night in pacing his apartment, expecting every moment that Julia, who was occupied according to her heart’s desire, would return to her home—but no Julia came; and in the morning he was saluted by the carrier, who asked him, with a knowing look, what had become of Mrs M’Iver, and to what use he had applied the coffin he (the carrier) had seen through the window when he last passed the house. Gustavus stared at him in amazement, without deigning one word of reply; but, the man being gone, he saw, with as much light as his brain was capable of reflecting, something like a foundation for a charge of murder against him, in the event of his wife not making her appearance. This conclusion wound up the evils that he had entailed upon himself by entering into the fearful state of matrimony; and there can be little doubt that, if he had known the Greek of the woman-hater, Simonides, of which of course he knew never a syllable, he would have thundered forth the whole epithets of his poem in a voice of thunder. Another day passed, and no Julia was yet to be seen; and on the second day, straggling individuals began to pry about the house, just as if a murder had been committed there, and they were looking for blood-spots. He grew every moment more terrified, was unable to cook, or even to eat, and roamed about with the muscles of his face hanging over the maxillary bones like flaps of leather, and sunken eyes that seemed to look inwards, where there was in fact nothing to be seen worth looking at. Every step frightened him, and every sound startled him, from reveries of trials and interrogations, and hanging and dissecting; for he looked every hour for a visit from the authorities. He had sense enough to see that everything was against him—the disappearance of Julia—their endless quarrels—the coffin—all arrayed against a drivelling, idiot statement about trying to wean his wife from the quaich by pretending to bury her alive.

Things were fast progressing to being just as bad as there is any occasion for them to be when a sinful man is the victim; for, some time afterwards, the mother of Julia herself, with two friends from the Canongate, came to see the married pair. Now, Gustavus saw them at a long distance, and, knowing that he could not account for his wife, he resolved upon sneaking away into the woods, after locking the door; and this accordingly he did in double quick time; but he had not got far away, when, upon turning to look behind him, he saw the carrier again returning, and very soon stop at his door, and enter into conversation with the three women. He watched all their motions, and it was apparent to him that the very affair of the murder they supposed he had committed was alone the subject of their conversation.

Nay, he saw them begin to try to force open the door and able to contain himself no longer, he said to himself—

“Shall Gustavus M’Iver, who has killed a dozen of Frenchmen in one day, be afraid of three women? The never will he, by Saint Sebastian!”

So he went back to the house; and when the three women and the carrier saw him coming out of the planting, they set up such a loud scream as had never been heard in these woods since the reign of the wolves, and ran up to him, crying out, that he was a base and a bloody murderer, and demanding to see the body of the sacrificed Julia, who, as her mother ejaculated, was never intended by nature to be the wife of such a fearful ogre.

“Give me the body of my daughter,” she said, “dead or alive. Where is the coffin that the carrier saw standing in the house? It is gone, and Julia is in it—buried, no doubt, in some hole of the woods. Why will you not speak, Gustavus M’Iver?”

Now, the very best reason on earth could be assigned for Gustavus saying nothing—and that was, that he had of a real truth nothing in the wide extent of his brain to say, that any one in the world, far less the mother of his wife, would believe for one instant of time. So he stood and rolled over the three women his large eyes, just, as the mother said, as if he would have eaten them all three, as she suspected he had done her daughter; but the never a vocable escaped from his lips.

“Why will you not speak, Gustavus?” cried the mother.

“Why will you not speak, man?” cried another of the women.

“Why will you not speak?” cried they all together in one question, so loud that no question since the time when all the Barons of England asked, in one cry, King John to give them their rights, had ever exceeded it in intensity and vociferation.

But it was clear this could last no longer than the patience of the women; and every one knows that the time comprehended by the longevity of that feminine virtue, is not so long as the life of Methuselah; so, in a minute, they fell on him with their nails, and rugged his hair, and scratched his face, and pulled him to the earth, and trampled upon him, till he who had fought in the Peninsula began to think that it was time for him to call up his old courage, and fight once again in his advanced years. So, rising up, he placed himself in an attitude which he knew had produced terrible effects in former times; and, to be sure, so it might, for he gnashed his teeth, and held out his yard-long arms, and rolled his eyes in such a manner, yet saying not a word all the while, that the women got alarmed, and cried to the carrier to assist them; but the man was off the moment he saw there was a chance of battle. So the women gave in, and began to try the soothing system with him—an effort in which they were as successful as their sex ever is when a man is to be humbugged; and Gustavus was on the instant mollified into softness, and even lugubrious sentimentality.

CHAPTER IX.
AN APPARITION.

There was a pause, after which Gustavus, offering two of the women an arm each, leaving the other to bring up the rear, he began a solemn march to the scene of his grief—the mysterious spot, where he threw down his long, lank body upon the ground, and muttered his sorrows between his lubber lips, in accents that would have put to flight the ugliest satyr that ever sported in a wood. He took up his station close by the mouth of the deceptive grave, to mitigate his sorrow and fear by a little sentiment—a coarse commodity, that might have made another laugh, but sufficient to make him weep. That day he might be in prison and ruined for ever; and, as for Julia M’Iver, he would never see her again. “She has been in this hole three days,” said he, pointing to the grave.

“Ochone! ochone!” roared the three women, crying bitterly.

Meanwhile, his heavy eye was fixed on the ground; he heard a noise, and, looking up, what on earth should he see but the head of Julia herself above the ground, and all the rest of her body below it? She leered at him and the women knowingly, and laughed till the woods rang; and, rising up out of the very hole where she had been interred, she ran, or rather staggered to him—for she was fresh from the still—flung herself around his neck, and hugged him with a grasp of embrace that many a husband would give a hundred pounds for any day. Nor was Gustavus insensible to its efficacy; for he returned the embrace, and even cried and blubbered like (as all sentimental writers say when they wish to express great sensibility—that is, babyism) a child—and a very pretty child to be sure he was. We cannot tell how long the embrace lasted. Everything in nature has been measured but love embraces. Writers are chary on the subject; and very knowingly, too, because they know that it is what is called “a kittle point;” but we have no such qualms, and so boldly assert, that Mr and Mrs M’Iver’s embrace lasted at least three minutes.

This new apparition transcended all they had yet seen or experienced; for how she could have lain three days and nights in the cold earth, and risen on the fourth as drunk as she was when she was interred, puzzled them beyond any conjuration they had ever heard of. But Gustavus was glad to see her on any condition, and took her straight home, to get an account from her, when she was sober of all the wonders she had seen in the bowels of the earth; where, in the midst of Hop and Mop, Pip and Trip, Fib and Tib, and Jill and Jin, and all the other imps of Mab’s court, she had doubtless been since the day on which she was let down into the pit. Whether he or the women ever got this information or not, we cannot say; but it is certain that he attempted no further cure of Julia’s irregular habits, contenting himself with the evil lot of a bad wife, which is, perhaps, the only one on earth that it is utterly impossible to get quit of by any other means than death.

THE FIRST AND SECOND MARRIAGE.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said a venerable-looking, white-headed man, accosting me one day, about six weeks ago, as I was walking alone near the banks of the Whitadder; “ye are one of the authors of the ‘Border Tales’, sir—are ye not?”

Not being aware of anything in the “Tales of the Borders” of which I need to be ashamed, and moreover being accustomed to meet with such salutations, after glancing at the stranger, with the intention, I believe, of taking the measure of his mind, or scrutinizing his motive in asking the question, I answered—“I am, sir.”

“Then, sir,” said he, “I can tell ye a true story, and one that happened upon the Borders here within my recollection, and which was also within my own knowledge, which I think would make a capital tale.”

Now, I always rejoice in hearing any tale or legend from the lips of a grey-haired chronicler. I do not recollect the period when I did not take an interest in such things; and a tradition of the olden time, or a tale that pictured human nature as it is, ever made the unceasing birr, birring of the spinning-wheel—which the foot, belike, of an aged widow kept in perpetual motion—as agreeable to me as the choicest music. For, what is tradition, but the fragments which History left or lost in its progress to eternity; and which Poetry, following in its wake, gathered up as treasures too precious to be overwhelmed by the approaching waves of oblivion, and, breathing upon them the influence of its own immortal spirit, embalmed them in the hearts and in the memories of men unto all generations? Though, therefore, it was no ancient legend which the stranger had to relate, yet, knowing that it might not on that account be the less interesting, I thanked him, “and with greedy ears devoured up his discourse.”

The story which he then related to me, I shall, therefore, after him, communicate to my readers.

You will excuse me in not mentioning the name of the town in which the chief incidents mentioned in our story occurred. There may be some yet living to whom some of them might not be agreeable. I shall, therefore, speak of it as the town of H——, and other circumstances referred to may lead you to form an idea of “its whereabouts.”

Many years have passed—at least forty—since the period at which our story commences; and there then dwelt in the town of H—— one Walter Kerr. (So you will allow me to call him.) His parents were what are generally called respectable sort of people; for the house in which they dwelt was their own, and there were also three or four others, all very good and respectable-looking houses (as we say again), the rents of which they received from their tenants. But there is no word in our language to which less respect is shewn than the word respectability. It is prostituted every day. Is is no matter whether a man be the proprietor of one house, one acre, one pound, or a hundred houses, a thousand acres, and ten thousand pounds; neither houses, acres, nor money can make him truly respectable. As the sun, moon, and stars shed light upon the earth, so do honesty, virtue, and strict integrity confer respectability on the head of their possessor. I care not what a man’s situation in life may be, nor whether he be a hewer of wood or a drawer of water, the lord of a forest, or one who hath a fleet upon the seas; shew me a good, a virtuous, and an upright man—and there is a respectable man, be his rank or situation in life what it may. The parents of Walter Kerr, however, were respectable in a better and a truer sense of the term than that of being merely persons of a certain property; they were Christians not only in their profession but in their practice. Walter was by far the cleverest of the family; and from his boyhood his parents designed him for the pulpit, and gave him an education accordingly. Like many parents, they thought that his cleverness was a sufficient reason why they should bring him up to the sacred profession, without once considering how far the seriousness of his thoughts and habits fitted him for preparing for the office. It must be acknowledged, however, that in this they were not singular. We find hundreds who, without perceiving either cleverness or piety in their favourite son, resolve to make him a minister. Yea, frequently, from his very cradle his calling is determined. I remember having heard a good woman say—“If I live to have another son, and he be spared to me, I shall bring him up for the kirk!”

But the parents of Walter Kerr were possessed of more discretion; and when they found that he was averse to their proposal of his becoming a preacher, they abandoned the idea, though not without reluctance, and some tears on the part of his mother. Now, Walter was a youth of a gentle temper and an affectionate heart; but, at the same time, he seemed formed for being what you would term a man of business. He was shrewd, active, speculative, and calculating, with quite a sufficient degree of caution, as ballast, to regulate his more ardent propensities. At his own request, he was bound apprentice to a general merchant in his native town; and before he was twenty-one years of age, he commenced business for himself. He began with but a small stock in trade; for his parents could not afford a great deal to set him up. Yet he was attentive to business; he pushed it, and his trade increased, and his stock became more various. He had scarcely, however, been two years in business, when he took unto himself a portionless wife. His parents were displeased—they looked upon him as lost. Every one said that he had done a foolish thing, and agreed that it was madness in him to marry, at least so hastily, and before he could say that even the goods in his shop were his own. But people are very apt to talk a great deal of nonsense upon this subject. The important question is not when a man marries, but who he marries. They talk of a wife tying up his hands, and placing a barrier before his prospects; in short, as bringing a blight over his worldly expectations, like an untimely frost nipping and withering an opening bud. Now all this is mere twaddle—a shewing off of self-wisdom, to make known how much more wisely we have or would have acted than the person referred to. It is one of the thousand popular fallacies which ever float on the surface of the chit-chat of society. A married man, young or old, is always a more sponsible sort of character than a bachelor. If a man take unto himself an amiable and a prudent wife, even though she bring him not a shilling as a dowry, and although he may be young in years and a beginner in business, he doeth well. Had he doubled his stock, his credit and his custom, he would not have done better; for he has a double motive to do so. He has found one to beguile his dulness, to soothe care, to cheer him forward, and to stimulate him to exertion; and that, too, tenderly as the breath of May fanneth and kisseth the young leaves and flowers into life and beauty. But all this dependeth, as hath been said, upon her amiableness and prudence; for, if the wife whom a man taketh for “better for worse,” possess not these indispensable requisites, he weddeth a living sorrow, he nurseth an adder in his bosom, he giveth his right hand to ruin.

Now, the wife of Walter Kerr possessed those qualities which rendereth a virtuous woman as a crown of glory to her husband. She was the daughter of a decayed farmer, and her name was Hannah Jerdan. To her the misfortunes of her parents were not such; for, while they had made her a stranger to luxury, they had introduced her to the acquaintanceship of frugality and industry. At the time she gave her hand to Walter Kerr, she was scarce twenty; and to have looked on her, you would have thought of some fair and lovely flower which sought the sequestered dale or the shaded glen, where its beauties might blush unseen—young, modest, meek, affectionate, and beautiful, man never led a lovelier bride to the altar. Her husband soon found that whatever the world might think or say of the step he had taken, he had done well and wisely. She not only became his assistant in his business, and one who took much care and anxiety from his mind, but her affection fell upon his bosom like the shadow of an angel’s wing, that was spread over him to guard him from evil; and he found her, too, as a monitor whispering truth in the accents of love. If he acquired money in trade, she taught him how to keep it and profit by it—and that is a “secret worth knowing.” Let it not be supposed that she was one of those miserly beings who scrape farthings together for the sake of hoarding them. In her spirit, meanness had no place; but there were two proverbs which she never suffered herself to forget, or those around her to neglect, and those were, that “a penny saved is a penny gained,” and “wilful waste makes woful want.” Nor do I wonder that the latter saying took deep root in her heart; for, as having experienced privation in the days of her father’s distress, there is nothing can be more painful to those who have known and felt what want is, than to see food, for want of which they were once ready to perish, wasted, and that, too, perchance, while a hunger-stricken beggar has been turned rudely from the door while he prayed for a morsel to eat. She would not see the crumbs which fell from the table wasted. In this her husband readily perceived the propriety of her conduct, and he esteemed her the more as he witnessed it; but the force of her first adage, that “a penny saved is a penny gained,” he was slow to appreciate in its true light. Yet for this, perhaps, there was a reason. Previous to his marriage, he had been in the habit of spending the evening after business hours, with a club of young tradesmen and other acquaintances. Now, habit is the pettiest and the most imperious of all tyrants. Even with a pinch of snuff it can make you its slave. It renders you miserable, until you once more bend the knee before it. But, as I have said, habit, though an imperious, is a petty tyrant; and three weeks’ resolution, though you will have struggles to encounter, will enable you to snap asunder the strongest chain that ever habit forged. I do not mean the habits, the seeds of which we acquire in infancy, and which grow with our growth and strengthen with our strength, and which, in fact, perform a part of our education (though we do not admit it), until they are set down as things belonging to or ingrafted in our natures; but I mean the habits which we acquire in after-life. And, as has been stated, Walter Kerr had acquired a habit of attending an evening club, of which he had been a member during the last year of his apprenticeship; and, from the period that he commenced business up to his marriage, and a few days after he had brought home his wife, he attended the club as usual. He was happy in the society of his young and fair wife; but still (as we say in the north), there was a “craiking” within him for something to make him perfectly happy, and that “craiking” was to attend the club as usual. Now, it was not a club in which they either drank deep or sat late—for it was a regulation amongst them that no man should sit in the club-room after ten o’clock, or drink more than three glasses; but, although they had this wholesome regulation, they had no by-law against what many of them called “adjournments,” or “sederunts,” and at which, though out of the club-room, the three glasses frequently became six.

With regard to the “sederunts,” however, Hannah had no cause to complain of her husband; for he never had been one of those who formed them. Neither did she murmur, or consider herself neglected, on account of his attending the club; for she reasoned with herself, that, after the cares, toils, and business of the day, he required some relaxation; and although her company might be more agreeable to him than any other, yet she knew that the beauty and the fragrance of a flower does not increase by for ever looking upon it, and on it only, but that our admiration of the flower increases, as we pass over the weeds which we behold around us. Yet, she thought that every night was too much—more than relaxation required; and she thought, also, that a shilling a-night was six shillings in the week (for let it not be thought that a club, of which Walter Kerr was a member, met on the Sabbath), and that six shillings a-week was nearly sixteen pounds in the year—a sum that might frequently be of use when accounts became due, and money was difficult to get in. She therefore delicately and tenderly endeavoured to break her husband from the habit he had acquired; but she attempted it in vain. He believed himself to be one of the most frugal and industrious tradesmen in the town; and nothing but bringing the fact plainly and broadly before him, seemed sufficient to convince him that there was aught of expensiveness in his habits. But his wife, more delicately and efficiently, did so convince him. They were talking together of many things, and their conversation lent wings to the short hours, when, an opportunity offering, she related to him an anecdote, which brought home to himself his nightly attendance at the club; and, as I know the story to be no allegory, nor child of the brain, but a fact, I shall relate it to you.

“In a town,” said she, “not many miles south of the Border, there dwelt a man who was by trade a mechanic, and who was the father of seven children. For sixteen years he had never wanted employment (when he chose to work), and his earnings averaged from five-and-thirty shillings to two pounds a-week. But, with a number of associates, he was in the habit of attending, daily and nightly, what they termed their house of call. In the morning, as he went to his labour, he could not pass it without having what he called his ‘nipper,’ or what some of the good people in Scotland call their ‘morning,’ which, being interpreted, meaneth a glass of gin, rum, or whisky.” (For gentle as Hannah was, there was a sprinkling of the wag in her character.) “At mid-day,” she added, “he had to give it another call; and to pass it on returning from his work at night was out of the question. Sometimes, and not unfrequently, when he called in for his ‘nipper’ in the morning, he sat down—in a room which had two windows, looking east and west—and forgot to rise until, after he had seen from the one window the sun rising, he beheld it set from the other. But it was the force of habit—it had grown in upon him, as he said; and what could the poor man do? He beheld his wife broken-hearted, going almost in rags, and their affection had changed into bickerings and reproaches. His children, too, were half-starved, ill-clad, and unschooled; and for what education they got, he thought not of paying the schoolmaster—he felt nothing in hand for his money, and therefore could not see the force of the debt. But the poor man could not help it. It was true he earned about two pounds a-week, but which way the money went he could not tell. He did not, as he thought, deserve the reproaches of his wife. His ‘morning’ was only fourpence, his call at mid-day the same, and his evening pipe and glass a shilling or eighteenpence—that, he thought, was nothing, for a man working so hard as he did; and when he did take a day now and then, he said that was not worth reckoning, for his clay could not keep together without moisture; and as for the glass or two which he took on a Sunday, why, they were not worth mentioning. Thus he could see no cause for the unhappiness of his wife, the poverty of his house, and the half-nakedness of his family. He had to ‘do as other people did, or he might leave their society;’ and he attributed all to bad management somewhere, but not on his part. But one Sunday morning he had lingered in their house of call longer than his companions, and he was sitting there when the churchwardens and parish-officers went their rounds, and came to the house. To conceal him from them there, and avoid the penalty—

“‘Tom,’ said the landlady, ‘here the wardens a-comin’. If they find thee here, lad, or meet thee goin’ out, thou wilt be fined, and me too; and it may give my hoose a bad name. Coom up stairs, and I will shew thee through the hoose, while they examine the tap and the parlour.’

“So saying, Tom the mechanic followed the hostess from room to room, wondering at what he saw; for the furniture, as he said to himself, was like a nobleman’s, and he marvelled how such things could be; and while he did so, he contrasted the splendour he beheld around him with the poverty and wretchedness of his own garret. And, after shewing him through several rooms, she at last, with a look of importance, ushered him into what she called the drawing-room—but, now-a-days, drawing-rooms have become as common as gooseberries, and every house with three rooms and a kitchen has one. Poor Tom the mechanic was amazed as he beheld the richly-coloured and fancy-figured carpet; he was afraid to tread on it—and, indeed, he was told to clean his feet well before he did so. But he was more astonished when he beheld a splendid mirror, with a brightly gilded and carved frame, which reached almost from the ceiling to the floor, and in which he beheld his person, covered with his worn-out and un-holiday-like habiliments, from top to toe, though they were his only suit. Yet more was he amazed, when the ostentatious mistress of the house, opening what appeared to him a door in the wall, displayed to him rows of shining silver plate. Ha raised his eyes, he lifted up his hands—‘Lack! Ma’am!’ says he, ‘how d’ye get all these mighty fine things?’

“And the landlady, laughing at his simplicity, said—‘Why, lad, by fools’ pennies to be sure.’

“But the words ‘fools’ pennies’ touched his heart as if a sharp instrument had pierced it; and he thought unto himself, ‘I am one of those fools;’ and he turned away and left the house with the words written upon his conscience; and, as he went, he made a vow unto himself that, until that day twelve months, he would neither enter the house he had left, nor any other house of a similar description—but that on that day twelve months he would visit it again. When he went home, his wife was surprised at his homecoming; for it was seldom he returned during the day. He had two shillings left; and taking them from his pocket, he gave them to one of his daughters, desiring her to go out and purchase a quartern loaf and a quantity of tea, sugar, and butter. His wife was silent from wonder. He took her hand and said—‘Why, thou seemest to wonder at me, old lass; but I tell thee what—I have had a lesson this mornin’ that I shan’t forget; and when thou findest me throwing away even a penny again, I will give thee liberty to call me by any name thou likes.’

“His wife was astonished, and his family were astonished; and in the afternoon he took down the neglected and dust-covered Bible, and read a chapter aloud—though certainly not from any correct religious feeling. But he had made the resolution to reform, and he had learned enough to know that reading his Bible was a necessary and excellent helper towards the accomplishment of his purpose. It was the happiest Sabbath his family had ever spent; and his wife said that, even on her wedding Sunday, she was not half so happy.

“But, the day twelve months from that on which he had seen the splendid furniture, the rich, carpet, the gorgeous mirror, and the costly plate, arrived. It was a summer morning, and he requested his wife and children to dress before seven o’clock. During the last twelve months, his wife and his children had found it a pleasure to obey him, and they did so readily. He took the arm of his wife in his, and each of them led a younger child by the hand, while the elder walked hand in hand before them; and they went on until they came unto his former house of call; and standing opposite it, he said unto his wife—

“‘Now, old woman, thou and the little ones will go in here with me for five minutes, and thou shalt see something that will please thee.’

“So they went into the house together, and Tom the mechanic found his old associates seated around the room as he was wont to see them twelve months before, just as though they had been fixtures belonging to the establishment: and as he, with his wife and children, entered, his former companions rose, and exclaimed in wonder—‘Ha! Thomas! what wind has blown thee here?’ For, though they called him merely Tom before, he had Thomas from them now. And, as the landlady entered and saw a well-dressed man and woman, with seven clean and well-dressed children around them, in her tap-room, she wondered exceedingly; for their appearance contrasted strangely with that of her other customers amongst whom they were seated.

“‘Why, don’t you know me, Ma’am?’ inquired Thomas, observing her look of curiosity and wonderment.

“‘Why, I can hardly say as how I do, sir,’ she replied; ‘and yet I am sure I have seen you somewhere.’

“‘That you have, Ma’am,’ answered he; ‘I am your old customer, Tom Such-an-one.’

“‘Lack me! is it possible!—and so you are! Why, what a change there is upon thee! thou art quite a gentleman turned. And is this lady thy wife, and these thy children? Well, now! how smart you have them all! How in the world do you manage it?’

“‘O Ma’am,’ said Tom the mechanic, ‘nothing in the world is more easy—the fools’ pennies which I before gave to buy your fine carpets, your mirror, and your silver plate, I now keep in my own pocket.’ So saying, he bowed to her, and wishing her good morning, with his wife’s arm in his, they and their children left the house and returned home. Such,” added Hannah, “is the true story of Tom the mechanic.”

The anecdote told upon her husband; and when she had concluded, he arose and took her hand, and said—

“You were right, love. I see it now—the story of Tom the mechanic has convinced me that a penny saved is a penny gained: and I shall remember it.”

Walter Kerr did remember it; and from that day he ceased his nightly visits to the club. The world prospered with him; and in a short time there was not a more thriving or a more respected merchant in the town of H—— than Walter Kerr. Every one began to say that he was greatly indebted for his good fortune to the excellent management of his wife. Even his parents at length admitted that his marrying Hannah Jerdan was the most fortunate thing that ever their son Walter did; and he himself said that she had been worth to him her weight in gold.

They had two children. Their first-born was a boy, and his name was Francis; and their daughter they had called Jacobini, after an only brother of Hannah’s and of whom nothing had been heard for many years. No poet in his waking dreams of domestic bliss hath pictured a happier pair than were Walter Kerr and his gentle Hannah. She was unto him as a guardian spirit, an affectionate counsellor, and a friend that sticketh closer than a brother. And as their children grew up in beauty before them, like fair flowers in spring, stealing day by day into loveliness, so grew their joy.

But, within eight years after his marriage, an unbidden guest—who entereth alike the palace and the cottage, whose eye pierceth through the deepest gloom of the dungeon, as he smiteth the prisoner and saith, “There is no darkness like unto my darkness”—placed his noiseless foot upon the threshold of the prosperous merchant, and with his cold and poisoned finger touched the bosom of the wife and mother.

Walter Kerr beheld his young, his beautiful, and excellent wife laid upon her dying bed, with the last breath of life quivering on her lips. His agony was the wildness, the bitterness of despair. He hung over her, he wrung his hands, he smote them on his bosom, he wept. He was as one who hath no hope, and on whom misery—deep, desolating, everlasting misery—had fallen. He would not, he could not be comforted.

“My own!—my own!” he exclaimed; “I cannot, cannot part with her!”

His was the extremeness of grief. An hour had arrived of the approach of which he had never thought, or if he had ever imagined that it would come, he had thought of it as belonging to a day that was far, far distant, and which might come when age would lead them together gently to the grave.

The young, the dying wife, stretched forth her trembling and feeble hand; and as he raised it to his fevered lips—

“Weep not, dear Walter,” she said falteringly; “but, oh! when I am gone, be kind to my dear children. And should you—” she added, but her voice failed, and tears mingled with the cold dews of death upon her cheeks. But in a few moments she again added—“Walter, should you marry another, for my sake see that she be as a mother to our children.”

“O Hannah!” he sobbed. Her words entered his agonized bosom like a barbed instrument, adding sorrow to sorrow, and pain to pain. He thought of her and of her only, and from the idea of another his soul revolted.

She called her children to her bedside, and she endeavoured to raise herself upon her elbow. She kissed them—she called them by their names—her last tears fell upon their cheeks and blended with theirs, and she bestowed upon them a dying mother’s blessing. She took their little hands, and placing them in her husband’s, gazed tenderly and imploringly on his face, and sinking back upon her pillow, with a deep sigh, her gentle spirit sought the world which is beyond death.

It was a melancholy sight to behold Walter Kerr with his young son and almost infant daughter in his hands, standing weeping over their mother’s grave, while the awful, the mortal words, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” were pronounced, and the sound of the cold red earth falling on the coffin rang rudely on his ears.

For many months there walked not on the earth a more sorrowful widower. His heart, his hopes, his joys, seemed buried in the grave of her who had been his wife. His sole consolation was in his children, and he doted over them with more than a father’s fondness. But he was still a young man, he was yet a prosperous one, and he had obtained the reputation of being wealthy.

His wife had been dead somewhat more than four years, when there came to reside in H—— a fair and fashionable maiden, whose name was Harriet Scott. She soon obtained the reputation of being the greatest beauty in the town, and was the favourite toast of every bachelor; amongst whom, if she did not conquer many hearts, she conquered many eyes; and if she had not lovers, she had manifold admirers. She was the daughter of an old military man, a major, belonging to some royal veteran battalion. Beautiful she certainly was; but she was vain as beautiful; and her father’s pay was all that stood between her and poverty.

There are but few men, and especially mercantile men, who are used to calculate and consider consequences, that are found guilty of the folly of offering their hand to a poor and fashionable woman. What fascination the gay and beautiful Miss Scott threw over our young and rich widower—

“What dreams, what charms,
What conjurations, or what mighty magic”—

I cannot tell. The gossips of H——, at their tea parties, said she had “set her cap” at him. But I am not much acquainted with the witchcraft of “setting a cap,” or how much the term implies. This I know, that when Walter Kerr first saw Miss Harriet Scott, he thought, what every person said, “that she was very beautiful,” though he also thought that she was a vain girl, conscious of her own attractions, and much too fond of dress and display. But, after he had seen her frequently, and she spoke with him familiarly, and that, too, in a voice which was almost as sweet as her face was beautiful—and when he saw, or thought he saw, that she smiled on him more frequently and more sweetly than on any one else—he began to think that she was an interesting girl, and by no means the vain creature he had at first imagined her to be. It is dangerous when a man begins to think a woman interesting. As their acquaintance grew, he discovered that she had no vanity whatever.

“She is,” thought he unto himself, “the fairest and gentlest being I have met with since—I laid my Hannah in the dust,” he would have continued; but, as the thought arose in his bosom, a tear gathered in his eyes, a low sigh escaped from him, and a glow overspread his face.

Every day, however, the beautiful Miss Scott became more interesting in the eyes of the thriving merchant, and his wealth more and more attractive to her; till in an evil hour he offered her his hand, and with a sweet blush, like the shadow of a rose leaf on a lily, the proposal was accepted.

His neighbours said, that, if his first wife had enabled him to make a fortune, he had got one who would spend it now. And they had not been husband and wife many months, until events began to shew that there was some truth in what their neighbours said. The dress of Mrs Kerr was gayer and far more costly than it had ever been as Miss Scott; though it was, from its extravagance, a subject of conversation, or what was called “a town’s talk,” then; and even Walter could not avoid contrasting, in his own mind, the showy and expensive attire of his living spouse with the plain and modest neatness of her who was not. She was kind enough to the children for a time; and she called them “the little creatures,” and “Kerr’s children.” But she saw them seldom. “Not,” she said, “that she disliked them, but that she could not be troubled with children being much about her.”

She was not long, however, in beginning to hint that it was rather derogatory in a Major’s daughter to have become the wife of a provincial shopkeeper. The smell of the goods, too, shocked her nerves, and injured her health.

“The smell from the shop hurt your nerves, dear!” said her husband—and the apartments they inhabited were immediately over the shop and warehouse—“the smell from the shop hurt you!”—continued he—“that is very strange! My poor Hannah never complained of such a thing, and I’m sure many a hundred times has she stood in it from morning to night.”

“Don’t talk to me, sir, of your Hannah, if you please,” added she; “if I threw myself away upon you, I was not to be insulted with odious comparisons about your Hannah.”

“Odious, indeed!” thought Walter, with a sigh; but he durst not express what he thought; for before this he had begun to discover the inflammable materials which his wife’s temper was made of.

“I tell you, Kerr,” added she, “the effluvia from your shop is insupportable. It shocks my nerves continually—it is killing me altogether.”

“Truly, my dear,” rejoined he, “I am at a loss to understand ye. Really every other person you meet talks about their nerves, and being nervous, now-a-days. But since I can remember, there were no such words in use—that is, as they are now applied. For, when we spoke of anything being nervous, we meant something that was strong and powerful, such as a nervous sermon, or a nervous speech in the House of Commons; and if we spoke of a man of nerve, it was a strong-bodied or a strong-minded man that we meant. But now-a-days the meaning is quite reversed; and when a person is spoken of as being nervous, or very nervous, it is always in reference to some silly shaking body, that has no nerve at all. And it is my candid opinion, dear, that nobody in this country ever complained of being troubled with the nerves until spirit-drinking and hot tea-drinking came so much in vogue!”

“O you savage!—you barbarian!” screamed Mrs Kerr, who seemed to have been struggling with a hysteric which now came upon her. We have seen people who have a convenient habit of assuming this pride-produced malady, and Mrs Kerr was now trying the effect of the experiment upon her husband; and the violence of the pretended paroxysm increased as he manifested the more and more tenderness and anxiety to soothe her; and when she had caused him to believe that he had succeeded in restoring her to consciousness—“Kerr,” said she, “we must, if you do not intend to kill me, leave this horrid house.”

“Leave the house, dear!” said he in surprise—“where could we go?”

“Go!” she replied—“Why don’t you take or build a respectable house out of the town, where a person could receive their friends. You cannot expect any genteel person to call upon us here, to be suffocated with the fumes of your nasty shop and warehouse.”

Walter was once more tempted to speak of his poor Hannah, and was about to say, that the most genteel people in the town and neighbourhood had visited her, without once hinting that there was anything disagreeable to them arising from the proximity of the shop and warehouse, or from the mixed goods which they contained. But it is a common saying, and a good one, that “second thoughts are best;” and Walter Kerr thought twice, and when he did so, he perceived that to speak of his dear and buried Hannah again, to her who now was to him as she was, would only be throwing oil upon a flame. He forebore and was silent.

I think—and so perhaps many of my readers will think—that, though a shrewd man, he was of too complying a temper. He was ready to sacrifice too much for what is called ease and peace. But in so doing, he was only like many others, whom you will find ready to say—“Oh, we are willing to do anything for the sake of peace.” And no doubt this is a very good spirit; but it may be carried too far. It is quite as possible for a man to be in error by enduring too much as by allowing too little. There is a middle path in everything; and it is always the safest, and generally the best. Extremes are always bad—so bad, indeed, that they are like two wild bulls running to encounter each other, and meeting on a common path, they thrust their horns into the foreheads of each other, and thus forcibly and painfully become as one body, to the obstruction of the thoroughfare. But, that Walter Kerr was too fond of yielding, will be proved from the circumstances of his having purchased a few acres of ground, and commenced the building of a country-house, about three miles out of H——, within three months after the conversation which I have related between him and Mrs Kerr took place.

Well, the house was finished, and a very neat, and I may say elegant-looking house it was. They had a garden behind it. Immediately in front was a parterre, tastefully laid out in plots; and between the parterre and the highway was a shrubbery, which, from the number of poplar and other rapid-growing trees in it, was no doubt intended, in a few years, to have the designation of “a plantation” or “a wood.” But, after the villa was built, Mrs Kerr discovered that new furniture was necessary for their new house.

“In truth, Harriet, my dear,” said Mr Kerr, “I can in no way see that new furniture is necessary. Ye will consider it would be extremely expensive. All that we have is strong and durable; I can see no fault with it.”

He would have added, “It was all of my Hannah’s choosing;” but every day the power of Harriet, her fashionable successor, had increased; and, although Walter knew not whence that power came, he was but too conscious of its existence; and he spoke not what he wished to have said.

To his last remarks she replied—“O Kerr! Kerr! when shall I get you to forget your low-life shop and counter? Why did I marry a man that has no ideas beyond saying ‘Thank you—I am much obliged to you,’ to every petty penny customer! And a man of your fortune, too!—Oh, meanness!—Kerr, I am ashamed of you.”

He stood out for a considerable time; but, for “the sake of peace,” he had already yielded to building the villa; and what was once done, was more easily done again—therefore he agreed to fit it up with new furniture. The building and the furnishing of the house cost Mr Kerr no small sum; and his name did not stand at the bank as worthy of credit to the amount that it once did. In his moments of solitude he thought of these things, and sighed.

Yet this was not all: when they had taken possession of the house, and Mrs Kerr had it, and the new and splendid furniture, with the garden, the parterre, and the shrubbery, there was something still wanting—and that was, a genteel approach to the house. Its present entrance was, as Mrs Kerr said, “no better than a gate to a cow park—as vulgar as the abominable shop and warehouse; and enough to prevent any genteel person from coming near them.” Indeed, she could not ask them while they had such an approach.

Yield once to a woman’s caprice, and you may yield always. Two instances in which he yielded have been mentioned, and he yielded a third time.

“Now,” thought he, “Harriet will surely be satisfied. I have built her a fine house, and fitted it up with fine furniture, and I have made her an avenue to it that a nobleman might enter. Oh, if my dear departed Hannah could look up, and see the folly into which I have been drawn, she would shake her head, and say—‘Walter, Walter!’—And well she might.”

And as Walter Kerr thought thus, he burst into tears.

But his wife was not content. The house, the garden, the shrubbery, the parterre, and the approach were not enough. She wanted her genteel friends about her, now that she was in a situation to receive them; and she brought them about her. She treated them, she feasted them. They were there not only one day in the week, but every day, by dozens and by scores. Our unfortunate merchant became a cipher in his own house and at his own table. He had formerly considered what are called genteel people as a rare sort of individuals, to be met with occasionally; but he now found them plentiful as gooseberries in August. They surrounded him like locusts. They were

“Thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa.”

And what surprised him most was, that first one and then another said to him, during dinner (in accordance with the absurd practice which still prevails)—“Mr Kerr, I shall be happy to drink a glass of wine with you;” and scarce had he swallowed one glass (for he always took off his heeltaps), until another said the same thing, and another and another, as though they had entered into concert to fire a regular feu-de-joie at his head; and he thought it a very hard thing that he could not take a glass of wine in his own house, without caring, or being told whether those who ate and drank at his expense, were happy at his drinking or not. Moreover, they acted as though they considered him honoured by their eating and drinking; and he saw their respect lavished on his genteel better half, while he was passed over as a sort of nobody. These were almost every-day doings, and he began to find that they were making fearful inroads on his cash account; in short, he discovered that if he had acquired a fortune rapidly during the life of his first wife, he was spending it as rapidly now.

One day, after a close examination into his books (and it was a very beautiful day, but there had been wet weather for some time before, and the roads were bad and disagreeable to walk upon), he returned home with the determination of saying unto his wife—“Harriet, it is impossible for me to stand the course of extravagance we are now pursuing. I shall be very happy to entertain your friends occasionally; but really this treating of them every week, I might almost say every day, is too much for any man in business to stand. Look at my profits and expenditure during the last three years.” And he had a statement drawn out.

But, as I have said, this was only a speech which he intended to deliver in the presence of his wife. Scarce had he sat down in the parlour where she was, until he perceived, from her looks and manner, that there was a coming storm; and he knew that the address which he had prepared would be ill-timed. He therefore sat in silence; but she did not long follow his example.

“Kerr,” said she, “I don’t know whether you mean to kill me, or what you mean to do; but I am kept here, mewed up like a prisoner.”

“Me keep you mewed up, dear!” said he; “ye certainly know that ye have full scope and liberty to do as ye please—ye are mistress of your own actions.”

“Me mistress of my own actions!” exclaimed she; “me go where I please!—what do ye mean? How can I go any where? Would you have me to go wading through the mire to visit any respectable person?”

“Certainly not, my dear!” said he; “but ye can take a fine day for your visits, when it is dry under foot.”

“O you brute!” exclaimed the delicate Mrs Kerr, “when shall I teach you to know anything? When shall I get your ideas carried beyond your counter? Is it not disgraceful to see you trudge, trudging into the town every day, like some poor beggar that had to work for his bread?”

“Beggars dinna work, hinny,” said he—“but do not be in a passion.”

“Passion!” cried she; “I tell you what, Kerr—if you continue to disgrace me as you have done, I shall never set my foot upon the outside of your threshold again. Why don’t you get a carriage?”

“A carriage!” he exclaimed, as though a thunderbolt had startled him in its flight.

“Yes! a carriage,” she resumed—“I ask you, why don’t you get one? Don’t tell me you can’t afford it. I know better.”

“I cannot tell what ye know, love,” said Mr Kerr; “but a carriage is out of the question.”

“It is not out of the question,” she resumed; “and question or no question, you must have one. Do you suppose I am to be kept here like a nun all my life?”

More conversation of a similar character passed between them; but it ended in this, that within two months Walter Kerr had a coachman, a carriage, and a pair of horses.

But in noticing the doings of the second Mrs Kerr, I have overlooked the situation of the children of poor Hannah. I have seen stepmothers who have been as kind to the children entrusted to their care—I have thought even more so—than if they had been their own. But such, the reader will already have imagined, was not the treatment of the children of Hannah Jerdan. Within twelve months from their father’s marriage, they became subjected to daily, almost hourly scenes of cruel, petty, and capricious persecution.

But they endured their hard treatment and murmured not. In the society of each other they were happy—they spoke of their mother and wept. To Jacobini she was as a dream-mother—like the “dream-children” of poor matchless Elia.

But Francis remembered his mother; and by that name he could never be brought to call her who had now taken her place. Mrs Kerr, indeed, though she had no children of her own, was wont to say—

“Don’t let the creatures call me mother.”

Time had passed on until Francis was a boy, or, perhaps, I should say a youth, of nearly fourteen, and Jacobini was approaching twelve. Now, it occurred, that, at the time I refer to, she had offended her stepmother, in what way I know not; but, according to the statement of the latter, it was an every-day offence—although Jacobini was a gentle child, docile as her mother was. But Mrs Kerr was in an evil humour, and, after having caused her favourite serving-maid to beat the child in her presence, not satisfied with the punishment she had received, she began to chastise her herself.

The cries of little Jacobini reached the ears of her brother, who was amusing himself in the garden. Although generally a quiet, he was a bold and passionate boy. He rushed towards the house—he burst into the room where his stepmother was gratifying her cruelty and hatred on his helpless sister—he rushed forward.

“Woman!” he cried, in the manner of one whose reason has left him, “if you strike my sister, I will strike you!”

“Boy!” she exclaimed, in a frenzy; and struck not only his sister again, but him too, and applied epithets to both, which, for the sake of human nature, it is as well not to repeat.

I have said that he was bold and passionate—he was also a tall and strong boy for his years. He grasped her more fiercely, and as she continued to vent her rage on both, and to strike at both, he dashed her to the floor, and exclaimed again—

“Woman! if you strike my sister, I will strike you!”

At that moment his father entered the house. Hysterics again came to plead the cause of Mrs Kerr. Walter had seen enough. He seized hold upon his son. He chastised him—unmercifully he did so; for he also, on occasions, was a man of violent passions; but, as with augmented rage he struck his son, the boy, while he submitted patiently to his chastisement, gazed in his face with a tearless and stern eye, and when he had exhausted his rage and strength, the boy turned on him and said—“Are you done, sir? I shall tell my mother this!—MY mother!”

When Walter Kerr heard the words—“I shall tell my mother,” and especially the words—“MY mother”—pronounced by his son, and the emphatic manner in which they were pronounced, he trembled—his heart filled—he burst into tears, and, stretching out his hand, he said—“Francis!”

But the boy exclaimed—“No!” refused the offered hand, and rushed out of the room.

Throughout the day he was not again seen; and after many days of diligent search after him had been made, it was ascertained that he had entered on board of a foreign trading vessel from Newcastle. Twelve months passed, and the vessel again arrived in Newcastle; but the captain stated that the astonishing boy (as he termed Francis) had left him, he knew not for why, nor for where, while they were upon the coast of Africa, where many vessels were.

The tidings fell sadly on the heart of Walter Kerr; but he had other evils to contend with. He had lost his son; and with his villa, his grounds, his carriage, and his visiters, he had lost the half of his fortune. But the ambition of Mrs Kerr was not yet satisfied. Her husband did not possess landed property sufficient to think of being a Justice of the Peace for the county; yet she thought it would give her additional importance were he chief magistrate in the town of H——. I will not say that Mr Kerr had not a sprinkling of ambition in his composition himself, and he more readily agreed that he should aspire to the honour of being elevated to the bench, than to any other whim that she had proposed to him. Therefore, after bestowing the necessary and customary (though illegal) fees on the corporators, which made another fearful inroad on his monied property, Mr Kerr had the honour and gratification of being elected chief magistrate of the town of H——.

“Now,” thought he, “Harriet will surely have reached the height of her ambition; she will be content now.”

But he was mistaken. She not only discovered that the idea of a magistrate standing behind a counter, and working amongst bales of goods, or casks of sundry liquors, was intolerable, but she declared that the effluvia which he brought with him from his warehouse on his hands and garments, was quite as obnoxious as though she still lived over it. And further, she added, that you might as well attempt to wash the Ethiopian white as wash it away. It rendered her incapable of taking her dinner every day.

Once again, Walter Kerr gave way, “for the sake of peace.” He gave a share in his business to a shopman who had been with him for many years, and became a sleeping partner himself. Jacobini was now a lovely girl of seventeen; but her persecution had increased with her years, until it became insupportable. She was treated not only as a servant but as a slave. Her father beheld what she endured, and he thought of the dying injunction of his Hannah, and sighed; but his interposition tended only to increase the sufferings which his daughter endured.

Jacobini possessed all the meekness and patience which had characterised her mother; but she was persecuted beyond their endurance. She tied up a few of her clothes, the plainest that she had, and with the little money which she had been enabled to gather together, she left her father’s house at the dead of night, and, wandering towards the next town, took her journey to London, where, through the instrumentality of a friend of her mother’s, she was in a few days hired as child’s-maid to a merchant in the city.

Her gentle disposition and acquirements soon rendered her a favourite with the family; and when they ascertained her history, she became as one of them.

About this time there was a young man, one William Jerdan, came from India to be initiated in the mysteries of business by her master. It was soon evident that he was no uninterested beholder of the gentleness and beauty of Jacobini. There was, perhaps, something of the ardent temperament of the clime in which he was born in his composition; and he suddenly made a declaration of his affection with an enthusiasm which, while it perhaps pleased, at the same time intimidated the retiring and the timid Jacobini. She therefore listened not to his words, and sought to avoid him. But the more her reserve grew, and the more she endeavoured to shun his presence, the more earnest became his entreaties, and the more ardent his declarations of affection. Thus several months passed, and there was a whisper in her heart, that she could love him, that she did love him; but she endeavoured to conquer it. She had often corresponded with her brother, and given him an account of all that she had endured since the day of his departure. He was now commander of a large vessel trading between India and the States of America. She had written to him on the day after her arrival in London; and about eight months afterwards received from him the following letter. It was addressed to the care of the friend who had procured her the situation:

“New York, August 15th, 18—.

“My dear Sister,—I cannot describe to you what were my feelings on receiving your letter, which communicated to me the tidings that you also had been forced to flee from our father’s house. It is perhaps sinful in me to do so, but I cannot avoid hating the woman whom our father would have us to call mother; not on account of her conduct to me (though it was cruel enough), for I always despised her—but, O Jacobini! it was because she was so unlike our mother, whom I remember better than you can, and whom I suppose you will now resemble as she lives in my memory—for all who saw you said, you ‘were her picture;’ but it is because of her cruelty to you that I hate her. The thought that you have been compelled to fly more than three hundred miles from our father’s house, and that your only hope is becoming the servant of our equals! Sister, when I received your letter and read this, it cost me a sleepless night; I cried like a child—and sailors do not shed tears for trifles. Yea, though I am no Catholic, I prayed that our mother’s spirit might watch over you and protect you, my sister! But I cannot endure the thought of your being a menial in the house of any one. With this, therefore, you will receive a draft for £100 upon the agents of my owners, payable at sight. The moment that you get it cashed, leave service, or I shall be angry.

“But now, my own sister, I have something else to tell you of. You know that our dear mother had a brother called James, and after whom you were named. He went to sea when but a boy, and was not again heard of. It was rumoured, and believed, that he and his shipmates were taken by pirates, and that they became a part of them. The story was not true. Eighteen months ago, I was in Bengal, and had dealings with a merchant, who, hearing the Scottish or rather the Border accent on my tongue, asked me from whence I came. I informed him; and he then, with a degree of curiosity, inquired who was my father, who my mother. When I spoke of our father—‘I remember him well,’ he said; ‘Wat Kerr—why, he was my school and class-fellow!’ But when I told him of our mother, and who she was, there was a visible paleness on his sun-burnt face; sweat stood in drops upon his brow, he gasped in his eagerness to hear me, and exclaimed—‘Youth! youth! does your mother live?’ ‘Oh, no!’ I answered; and the tears gushed into my eyes, sister. ‘Come to me! come to me! my sister’s child!’ he cried, and he threw his arms around my neck. Jacobini, it was our uncle—our mother’s brother. And when I had told him all, and how and why I had left the house, and spoke of you, and of your being named after him—‘If I live,’ said he, ‘for two years more, I shall see my little niece, my namesake—she shall be my daughter.’ He had been many years a prisoner, and on obtaining his liberty became a sort of secretary to a nabob in India. He had written repeatedly to his parents; but he received no answer, for ere then they were dead; and his sister—our mother—he knew not whether she lived, where she was, or by what name she might be found. He is now a widower, and has an only son, nearly my age. Our cousin, Jacobini, is a noble, kind-hearted fellow. I should have loved him though he had been no relative of mine, from the moment I became acquainted with him. His name is William, and before this reaches you, he will be in London where you are; for, when I last left Bengal, he was preparing to go to London, to be thoroughly instructed in the rules of business. He was to be in the house of one Mr L——, in Throgmorton Street. By inquiring there, you will easily find him; and the moment you receive this, call upon him—he will rejoice in having found you—he will protect you until I see you, which will be in the course of next year; for, after again going to Bengal, I have a voyage to make to England; and our uncle has promised to accompany me. Therefore, within twelve months, we shall meet again. Remember me to my cousin when you find him, which you will easily do. You may shew him this letter; and when he has seen it, I am sure you will find in him a warm and a steadfast friend, and one who will not endure the degradation of your remaining an hour in a state of servitude.

“Farewell, dear and only sister, until we meet; and if you ever hear from our father, tell him that I yet live, that I think of him, and love him—but, O Jacobini! the woman that rules his house, renders it impossible that I can again enter it. Write to him that I shall meet him in London next year, but he must not bring her. Again, farewell, dear sister—wait upon our cousin with this letter; it will be an agreeable surprise—and I am, ever, your affectionate brother,

“Francis Kerr.”

Such was the letter which Jacobini received from her brother. But it would be a vain task to describe her feelings, on its perusal. From it she found that her lover and cousin—he whom she did love, though she shewed it not, and whom she sought to avoid—was one and the same person. She was commanded to shew the letter to him!

“To him!” said Jacobini; “I cannot.” And yet while she so said she wept with joy. She went not to him—nor needed she; for, as was his wont, within an hour he threw himself in her way—for he watched her every movement. She had never spoken to him unkindly (for it was not in her nature), but always coldly. She had the letter in her hand, and she was weeping over it when he saw her.

“Why does my Jacobini weep?” said he: “if aught distresses you, why refuse the friendship and the hand of one who is ready to bear your sorrows and protect you?”

“William,” she said, falteringly—and it was the first time she had called him by that name—“read, read this.” And she put the letter into his hands.

He took it—his eyes eagerly glanced over it; but before he had finished it, he flung his arms round her neck, and exclaimed—“My cousin!—my Jacobini!—mine!”

Her face fell upon his bosom, and she wept. Few words were spoken between them; but they understood each other. He took her hand in his, and still holding the letter, he led her to the room of her master and his mercantile instructor. They were both in tears as they approached him.

“Master William,” said the merchant, with a look of surprise, “what’s the meaning of this?”

William put the letter which his fair cousin had received into his hands. The merchant perused it.

“Miss Kerr,” said he, “I am sorry that I was not sooner acquainted with your history. If you will, you shall still remain in my house, as a friend, but not as a menial. My opinion of your cousin William, though I say it before him, agrees with your brother’s. Whatever his faults are, they belong to his head, not to his heart, and a little experience will correct them. I believe I have seen more between you, at least on his part, Jacobini, than your brother knows. But hitherto, while I discouraged, I was not displeased at the affection which I saw my young protegé manifested towards you. And when my friend, your uncle and his father,” (for he spoke to Jacobini), “arrives in England, I shall rejoice not only in being able to introduce to him his niece, but in recommending a daughter.”

As the merchant spoke, William and Jacobini hung their heads, and tears and blushes were on their cheeks together.

She remained in the house; and I need hardly say, that her cousin now looked upon her as his betrothed; and in the same manner did she regard him.

Before twelve months went round, her brother and her uncle arrived in London. It would be a vain task in me to picture their interview—to describe their joy—to pourtray their surprise. The reader will imagine it more vividly. Why should I tell how the brother wept upon the neck of his sister, and how her tears fell on his bosom; or how the merchant drew her uncle aside, and in a few words told him the affection that existed between his son and his niece, and of the worth of both. Nor need I tell how James Jerdan, after listening to the merchant, came forward with a full heart, and in one hand taking the hand of his niece, and in the other that of his son, joined them, saying—“Bless my children!”

Within a month, the indissoluble knot was tied between William and Jacobini, and they went down to Scotland to spend their honeymoon, her brother accompanying them; but her father-in-law refused to go with them, as he thought his presence might not be acceptable to her who was now the wife of his late sister’s husband.

Jacobini had never heard from her father, though she had often written to him, since she left his house. But from the day that she departed, ruin had followed fast upon him. When he left his business, because his wife was ashamed of it, business became ashamed of him. Her extravagance increased, and his property decreased. His villa, his carriage, his all that never should have belonged to him, became a jest among his neighbours. He was declared a bankrupt—he was cast into prison. The villa and the surrounding grounds were sold, the carriage was sold, and his wife went to reside with her father, who was then upon his death-bed.

When Jacobini, her husband, and her brother, arrived in H——, they found their father a captive in a prison-house. They entered the prison to see him; and when he beheld them, he knew only his daughter. But they all, they each embraced him; they called him “Father!” and the poor man wept, even as a child weeps. He spoke of their mother—he entreated their forgiveness; but his son and his daughter clung around his neck, and cried—“Say nothing, father!”

They sent for his solicitor. His son and his son-in-law paid his debts in the prison. They led him out in their arms. They sent for his wife, the gay Miss Scott, that was their cruel stepmother, her father had died about a week before, and she was left destitute, having ruined her husband.

“I will support my father,” said Francis; “but I will have nothing to do with maintaining that woman.”—for she had been sent for against his wish.

“Then I will support her,” said Jacobini—“William, will not you?” she added, addressing her husband. “Let bygones be bygones—she is my father’s wife—she must have cared for me before I could have cared for myself.”

“Yes, love, yes, we will support her,” said her husband.

They did as they had said. Walter Kerr lived in comfort on an annuity which his children allowed him; and his wife, while she partook of it, repented because of her extravagance, and because of her cruelty to those from whose bounty she was now fed. Jacobini went with her husband and her father-in-law to India, where in a few years a happy family gamboled around them, and Francis increased in wealth, but lived a bachelor, and left his property to his sister’s children.

THE DISSOLVED PLEDGE.

“Hold hard!” said the coachman, as he gathered up his reins, and flourished his whip—and away lumbered the heavy afternoon coach, for the South, from the door of the coach office. It was full inside, with only one outside passenger. After it was fairly out of the town, and the road had become comparatively clear of carts and carriages, the coachman, after two or three quiet, reconnoitering glances at the gentleman who occupied the box-seat, tucked the apron comfortably over his knees, and having settled himself to his own satisfaction, began to weary of so long a silence, and endeavoured to break the spell by the novel and interesting remark—“It’s a fine afternoon, sir.”

“Yes.”

A long pause.

“Fine horses these, sir.”

“Yes.”

Another long pause.

“Queer fish this,” muttered the coachman to himself. “I wonder if he can say No. I’ll try him once more. Take snuff, sir?” said he, thrusting the mull under the nose of his victim.

“No, I thank you,” followed by an impatient rustling of his cloak, and a restless movement on the seat.

The coachman gave up the matter in despair, and was obliged to content himself with holding agreeable converse with his cattle, in which he certainly had the best of it, as they bore all he chose to inflict, in silence.

The man of few words was a youth of one or two-and-twenty, of pleasing and gentlemanly exterior; and, although the coachman looked with great contempt upon one who would not take snuff, and who did not admire his favourite horses, we hope he will prove an object of greater interest to our readers, as he is to be the hero of our story. Poor fellow! no wonder that he wore such an air of sadness and abstraction, and that he shrank from the well-meant, though obtrusive advances of the knight of the whip. Most of us have experienced—and who that has experienced can ever forget?—the feelings of mingled sorrow and hope with which we have, for the first time in our lives, turned our backs upon the home of our childhood, and were fairly launched, on our own responsibility, into the untried ocean of life. How fondly did our thoughts rest upon the much-loved scenes we were leaving behind us! how vividly did we recall each look and action of those nearest and dearest to our hearts! and how perseveringly did we cling to our sorrowful yet pleasing recollections, shutting our eyes and ears to the vulgar sights and sounds of every-day life around us, and shrinking from communication with our fellow-men, as if our sorrow were “a thing apart,” too sacred to be unveiled to the eyes of others. Such were the feelings of young Edward Malcolmson, our silent friend. He was leaving, for the first time, a mother he tenderly loved, sisters who doted on him, and, last, though not least, he was leaving one who was dearer to him than them all—one whom he then thought, as most of us have thought once in our lives, he would never, never forget—the joy of his heart, the light of his eyes (as the poets word it), his first, his only love. No wonder, then, that he flapped his travelling cap down over his ears, folded his arms on his breast, and, fixing his eyes upon the footboard, sat the very image of determination—to be miserable. Night was closing around, but the darkness was congenial to his feelings; he could now indulge them unobserved, and he abandoned himself to them without control. He felt the same kind of listlessness and prostration of mental energy which those experience who suffer from sea-sickness; so much so, that when a sudden gust of wind whisked his cap off his head, he was too completely victimised even to mention his loss to the coachman.—“Let it go! What do I care? O Jessy!”

The latter part of this effusion he unconsciously uttered aloud.

“That’s the name of my near wheeler, sir,” said the coachman, glad to hear dummy speak at last, and still more delighted to have an opportunity of hearing himself. What a strange mixture of inconsistencies is the creature man! This ludicrous and unexpected appropriation of his beloved one’s name, tickled Edward Malcolmson’s fancy; and he who the moment before had thought himself the most miserable dog in existence, burst into an extravagant fit of laughter. The coachman was delighted with the success of his random remark; and it was with a chuckle of unaffected, kind-hearted pleasure, that he exclaimed—

“It does my heart guid to hear ye laugh. Naething like it, sir, for keeping a body gaucie an’ comfortable.”

The ice was broken; the conversation was kept up for some time—at first only in monosyllables, on Edward’s part; but he could not long resist the contagion of the man’s persevering merriment, and he gradually shook off the weight which had before almost overpowered his spirit. Sorrow gave way to hope for the future, and, with all the sanguine buoyancy of youth, he already, in fancy, began business for himself, in an extensive way, as a builder—of castles in the air. Those castles in the air, those bubbles of fancy, how soon do they crumble away, and burst amid the jostling realities of life! How soon are our eyes opened to their hollowness and vanity! The visions of early hope are like the rainbow—bright and beautiful it appears before us, spanning half the heavens with its brilliant arch, and fading even while we gaze upon it. Fleeting, yet delightful dreamings of fancy! whither have ye fled? Gone, with the buoyant spirits and unchilled affections of youth; and we, the seared and world-hardened, sigh when we look back to you, to think that ye have proved to be but delusions. But a truce to sentiment; it is time that we should introduce our hero to our readers, to do which satisfactorily, we must glance backwards to a period some thirty years anterior to the date of our story, and give some account of his parents.—Mrs Malcolmson was the widow of a substantial tradesman in Edinburgh, who had been dead for some years, having left her in tolerably comfortably circumstances, with two daughters and one son, the Edward of our story. She was a woman of manners and education far superior to her husband’s station in life—the only daughter of an Irish family of distinction, in the neighbourhood of Cork, and moving in the first circles there. She had been attracted by the personal appearance and agreeable manners of a young subaltern in a regiment quartered in that city. Philip Denby was a man well calculated to catch the fancy of a young and romantic girl. To great personal attractions, he united the most polished, yet unaffected manners; was highly accomplished, and was blessed, moreover, with an excellent disposition. But, with all these advantages, young Denby had one drawback—a drawback of no slight importance in the eyes of worldly-minded mammas, and of their prudent daughters—he was poor. They were all loud in his praise—so elegant, so delightful, so interesting! They all agreed in thinking that no man dressed better, made a more distingué figure in a ball-room, or a more agreeable one in general society; but then, poor fellow, what would all that do for him?—he had nothing but his pay to depend upon. The consequence was, that, though the “admired of all admirers,” the young subaltern was looked upon as a “detrimental;” and the mammas, while they were eager to have so handsome an officer to grace their parties, were unwearying in their warnings and admonitions to their daughters, to beware of any serious entanglement with so poor a man. In general, these hints were not thrown away; but there was one, and she was the best and loveliest of the circle, who turned a deaf ear to them all. She listened only to the whisperings of her own heart, which told her that Philip Denby, poor in purse, was rich in all the qualities which adorn a man. Philip had long admired Ellen O’Connor, but as he would have admired a star in the distant sky—so great was the disparity which, to his sensitive mind, there appeared to be between their respective stations in life. She was the beautiful and only child of rich and purse-proud parents, and entitled to look forward to an alliance with the rich and high-born; while he, though a gentleman by birth, and so far her equal, had nothing but his profession to depend upon. Hitherto he had escaped, “fancy free,” from all the dangers which surrounded him in the shape of bright eyes and beautiful forms; he felt flattered by the attentions which were everywhere paid him by the young and fair; but the very general popularity he enjoyed, was the best safeguard of his heart; all smiled upon him, and he in return smiled upon all, without feeling particular regard for any. He had come to the magnanimous resolution, that he was too poor to marry a poor woman, and too proud to marry a rich one—and he was in a fair way to become a regular male flirt, when he first met Ellen O’Connor. We will not attempt to enter into a description of Miss O’Connor’s beauty, particularly as it lay more in expression than in feature; such as it was, however, all Philip’s philosophy sank before it, like snow before a sunbeam. We shall merely remark, that she had eyes dark as her raven hair, with the light of a bright, and joyous, and confiding spirit flashing through them; the rest we leave to the imagination of our readers—for

“Who has not felt how feebly words essay
To fix one spark of beauty’s heavenly ray?”

Our limits will not allow us to enter into particulars. If this were a novel, instead of a tale of real life, we might follow the course of their love, step by step, and expatiate upon the stolen glances, the tender tête-à-têtes, and all the sentimental etceteras which usually form the burden of a tale of love—fortunately for our readers, we must, perforce, spare them the infliction. Suffice it, that their mutual attachment soon became the subject of common remark and conversation; and, at last, those who were most interested, and, as usual, most blind, were enlightened by the hints and charitable warnings of sundry busy, good-natured friends. Dire was the wrath of old O’Connor, when his eyes were opened to the truth: he cursed his own blind folly, for having allowed matters to go so far; cursed (but not aloud, he was too prudent for that) the wife of his bosom, for having been as blind as himself; and cursed every red coat that ever was made, and every unfortunate wight who had ever worn one. At length he remembered the legitimate object of his wrath, and hastened out of the house in search of Denby. Fortunately for them both—for Philip was not a man to bear unmerited abuse with patience—he failed in his object; Philip was not to be found at his lodgings, at the reading rooms, or at the billiard-table, for the best of all reasons—that he was seated beside Ellen O’Connor, not five minutes after her father had left her. While the one was leaving the house in one direction, the other was arriving at it by another. Philip found her in tears; and, in answer to his impassioned and alarmed inquiries, she gave him an account of the scene she had just witnessed, and implored him, if he had any affection for her, to bear patiently the intemperance which, she feared, her father would indulge in if they should meet. He calmed her fears on that score, and they had a long and interesting conversation, the result of which was, the conviction that it was impossible for them to live without each other. What arguments the philosopher, Denby, made use of, we know not; but the result was, that, in three days, Ellen O’Connor eloped from her father’s house in his company. Some weeks passed gaily and happily over the heads of the young couple; but they were soon awakened from their dream of love and bliss, by the sterner realities of life. The story of old O’Connor’s aversion to the match, and his loud and angry invectives against his daughter, had gone abroad, and Philip’s creditors became pressing in their demands for payment. Ruin stared them in the face; and Ellen, whose fear of meeting her justly-incensed father had hitherto prevented her from seeking his forgiveness, was determined to brave the interview she dreaded. With a faltering step she sought her father’s dwelling; and her heart smote her, when she thought how happy that home had been, till she introduced sorrow and disappointment there. The house was shut up—the family had left it in charge of a single servant, who delivered to Ellen a letter that had been left for her by her father, in case of her return. It contained merely the following words:—“Ungrateful girl! As you have sown so must you reap: you are an outcast from my home and heart for ever! Never presume to approach this house again.” With eyes blinded with tears, and a heart swelling with anguish, she returned to her husband, who was anxiously awaiting the result of her visit.

“Well, dearest?” said he.

“He has rejected me for ever, Philip!” sobbed she, as she threw herself into his arms.

“Grieve not, my love!” said Denby, while his anxious look and heavy sigh betrayed how much he himself needed consolation—“are we not all in all to each other?” And, as he embraced his young and lovely wife, he forgot, for a moment, the world and all its cares. By the sale of his commission, he contrived to raise money enough to pay his trifling debts, and to support himself and his wife for some months in strict economy; but that temporary supply diminishing rapidly, he was obliged to apply to some of his numerous friends to exert their interest, or open their purses in his favour. Disappointment followed all his applications; and, harrassed in mind and wearied in body, he lay down on the bed of sickness and sorrow, from which he never rose again. He just lived long enough to see and bless his newly-born infant, leaving his wife to struggle with poverty and grief. Mrs Denby’s sorrow was at first excessive; and serious fears were, for some time, entertained by her medical man, for her life; but youth and a good constitution carried her through. She was a woman of warm and passionate feelings, and her grief soon exhausted itself by its violence. Besides, it is one of the blessings of poverty, that it allows no time for brooding over sorrow, but calls for active and constant exertion, to ward off the evils it entails. In her distress—for she was left almost destitute—she again applied to her father; but he continued inexorable, and sternly refused to see her. His example was followed by the rest of her family connections, all of whom were, or affected to be, indignant at her conduct. A maternal uncle, however, pitying her destitution, promised to settle a small annuity upon her, and to bring up and provide for her infant son, on condition that she would never interfere with his education, and would leave the country within six months.

Severe as these conditions were, she at last agreed to them, though to do so cost her many a bitter tear; but, when she thought of her own destitute condition, and of the brighter prospects which the proposed arrangement would open to her son, she struggled to suppress the fond yearnings of a mother’s affection, and to close with an offer which she hoped would be for her boy’s future benefit. It was with an agonised heart she tore herself from her little Philip, whose uncle received him with the greatest delight, and solemnly promised to be to him as a father. She then bade adieu for ever to her native land, after having again ineffectually endeavoured to obtain her father’s forgiveness. In two years’ time, she was again a wife and a mother. Mr Malcolmson, a respectable Scottish tradesman, when on a visit to some friends in Cork, had accidentally seen the young widow, at the time when her late bereavement, and her family’s cruel rejection of her, excited universal sympathy and commiseration; and when he afterwards met her in Edinburgh, where she was living in humble seclusion, he contrived to form her acquaintance; and, in a few months, made her a formal offer of his hand and fortune. Mrs Denby received his addresses with graceful and grateful acknowledgments; but told him that she had no heart to bestow, that her affections were buried in the grave with her husband, and that she could never love another. “If you cannot love me as your husband,” replied he, “you may respect and esteem me—you may look upon me as your friend, your guardian, your protector—as one whose pride and pleasure it will be to anticipate all your desires, and to shield you from all annoyances.” In her union with the worthy and amiable Malcolmson, Ellen Denby was blessed with a recompense for all her past distresses: for ten years he was to her the kindest of husbands, the most affectionate of friends; and the only unhappy moment she experienced during her union, was that on which it was about to be dissolved for ever. He left her comfortably provided for, with three children—two girls, and a boy, the hero of our tale. Edward Malcolmson, at the time of his father’s death, was a boy of excellent dispositions; and, as he grew up, he amply fulfilled the promise of his childhood. He was a young man of solid rather than brilliant talents; mild and gentlemanly in his manners; slow to form plans, but persevering and determined in following them out. He had received a medical education, and had distinguished himself by his close application to his studies, and by his rapid progress in professional acquirements. Through the interest of some of his late father’s friends, he had obtained an appointment on the Bengal establishment; and was, at the time of the commencement of our story, on his way to London, there to join the ship that was to convey him abroad. Mrs Malcolmson’s nearest neighbour in Edinburgh, was a widow lady, named Martin, who, like herself, was living in comfortable, though not affluent circumstances. Her only daughter, Jessie, was her mother’s darling, and well deserved the affection which was lavished upon her. She was about the same age as Edward Malcolmson, and, without being absolutely lovely, there was a charm in her simple, unaffected manners, and in the ingenuous expression of her countenance, which, added to an uncommonly fine figure and sweet voice, gave her the advantage over others who far excelled her in mere beauty of feature. Between her mother and Mrs Malcolmson, the closest intimacy had existed for several years; indeed, they had lived so secludedly, that they had hardly any acquaintances beyond the circle of their own families. The consequence was, that the young people were almost constantly in each other’s society; and their parents remarked, with pleasure, the mutual attachment which seemed to be springing up between them. They did, indeed, feel a warmer regard for each other than is often the result of such constant and close intimacy; for it is but too often the case with human character as it is with the face of nature—“’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.” But it was not till the time of Edward’s departure approached, that they became mutually aware how dear they were to each other. The morning before leaving Edinburgh, young Malcolmson called to bid adieu to his friends. Mrs Martin happened to be out walking, and Jessie was sitting alone in the parlour, when Edward was ushered in. She turned pale when she saw him; for her heart sunk at the prospect of their approaching separation.

“Jessie,” said he, after they had sat in silence some minutes, “I have come to bid you farewell.”

“I feared so,” said she, striving in vain to repress her tears.

“Do not—do not cry, dear Jessie,” exclaimed he, starting up, and seizing her hand, while his own eyes were dimmed with tears—“I cannot bear to witness your distress.”

“Would you have me look happy and cheerful, when my old friend and companion is going to leave me, perhaps never to return?”

“Companion, Jessie! friend!—these are cold words to me, whose whole heart is yours; who live but in the light of your smile; who love you as I have never before loved human being, and never shall love again. Jessie! dear Jessie! tell me that I do not love in vain; give me one word of hope to cheer me during my painful absence. Will you not answer, dearest?”

She turned her tearful eye up to his face, and then, hiding her blushing cheek upon his arm, she murmured—

“What would you have me say, Edward? We have been dearer to each other than brother and sister; we have been dreaming a pleasant dream, and now we are awakening from it; we are about to part, perhaps never to meet again.”

“Oh, yes, dearest! we shall meet again. The world is all before me, and I have youth and energy to carry me through it. Only tell me that, if fortune favours my exertions, you will smile upon me; and the hope of one day calling you mine, will cheer me under misfortune, and encourage me to renewed efforts. Only tell me that you will not forget me, and I here vow, as soon as I have obtained a competency, to return and claim you for my bride.”

“Make no rash promises, Edward! We are both young, and have neither of us seen much of the world, or of others. You know what your favourite song says—

‘Change o’ fowk and change o’ scene
May gar thy fancy jee.’”

“Never, Jessie, never!”

But we will not weary our readers with any more of this easily imagined effusion. They parted under a mutual agreement of fidelity to each other: how well they adhered to it remains to be shewn.

We will not follow Edward Malcolmson on ship-board, nor attempt to describe that most uninteresting of all uninteresting things, a pleasant passage; but will merely state that he arrived in safety at Calcutta, where he soon rendered himself conspicuous by his active discharge of the duties imposed upon him. His zeal and talent attracted the notice of the ruling powers, and he obtained a lucrative appointment at the Presidency, the salary of which, added to the liberal fees he received in private practice, soon enabled him to clear off the debts he had unavoidably contracted at his outset, and to lay the foundation of a rapidly increasing fortune. The habits of his previous life rendered it an easy task for him to unite the most careful economy with a liberal and gentlemanly expenditure. He had been early taught that true economy consists in restraining our desire for the superfluities, not in debarring ourselves from the enjoyment of the comforts of life. His careful regulation of his expenses, and his indifference to show and parade enabled him, on proper occasions, to give greater scope to the natural generosity of his disposition than he otherwise could have done. Esteemed for the steadiness and consistency of his character, and beloved for his kind and amiable qualities, he soon became one of the most popular men of his class in Calcutta, besides having deservedly acquired the reputation of being one of the most skilful. Fortune had thus far favoured him beyond his most sanguine expectations; and, in so expressing ourselves, we do no injustice to his merits; for how often are the most splendid talents lost to the world, even when seconded by persevering energy, for want of opportunity for their display? At a comparatively early age, he had nearly attained the summit of his profession; he had far outstripped those who had started with him in the race for wealth and distinction; he was generally and deservedly beloved and respected—and yet he was not happy. “Change o’ fowk, and change o’ scene,” had made a great alteration in those feelings which, with the fond enthusiasm of youth, he had thought would remain unshaken for ever; and the recollection of his engagement to Jessie Martin, which was once his greatest solace, now hung like a cloud over his spirits. For two or three years, her image had been ever present to his thoughts, and had formed his principal incentive to exertion; but Time had been gradually dimming his memory of the past. He began almost unconsciously to regret having so inconsiderately shackled the freedom of his inclinations, and, when he gazed on the many lovely forms around him, he wished he had followed Jessie’s advice, not to bind himself by a formal promise, until he had seen more of the world and of the people in it. The engagement had been made, however, and true to his principles, he was determined to adhere to it, although, to do so, he was obliged resolutely and firmly to avoid the society of one who had begun to usurp Jessie’s place in his affections. He had written home from time to time, giving a full account at first of his flattering prospects, and of the hope that cheered him on in his path; and now, after a lapse of eight years since his arrival in India, he wrote to say that fortune had so far favoured him, that he considered himself justified in thinking of making a change in his condition. He told not of his cool and altered feelings—he considered it his duty to conceal them, and to adhere to his engagement, even at the sacrifice of his happiness; and he wrote to claim the fulfilment of Jessie’s promise, and to beg her, if her feelings remained the same towards him, to come out to him by the first opportunity. Time had been busy also with Jessie. Long separation had gradually weakened her affection for Edward; and a freer intercourse with the world and with society, had produced its natural effect—a love of change and variety. She had been much and generally admired, and, although very guarded in her behaviour, and cool and distant in her manners to the young men who flocked around her, had received several very advantageous offers, which she had instantly and decidedly rejected, as she considered herself in honour bound to adhere to her early engagement. Her feelings towards Edward had, however, lost their freshness and warmth, and had gradually acquired a tone of indifference; and although she had formed no other particular attachment, she grieved to think that she could not participate in the constancy of affection which seemed to pervade his letters to her. Thus were they mutually deceived, and each looked forward with anxiety and alarm to the period of their meeting, which was now not far distant, as Jessie had received Edward’s invitation, and had announced her intention of taking her passage in the Lady Flora which was shortly to sail for Calcutta. It was with but little of the joy of a bride-expectant, that she began her preparations for her voyage; for she was conscious that she had none of that feeling of devoted attachment to her betrothed which a woman ought to have towards the man whom she is to vow at the altar, to “love honour, and obey.”

We must leave her to complete her arrangements, and recall the readers’ attention to one who must, by this time, we fear, almost have escaped from their recollection—young Philip Denby, whom we left in Ireland, under the guardianship of his uncle. The lovely child had grown up a handsome and promising youth, and had endeared himself to his uncle by his grateful and affectionate disposition. He had received all the advantages which wealth and liberality could bestow, and, though avowedly the intended heir to his uncle’s handsome fortune, had been brought up in the strictest habits of business and regularity. His gay, light-hearted, joyousness of spirit, his frank and engaging manners—had made him a general favourite; but, fortunately for him, he had been taught to regulate his conduct by strict principle, and he always kept in mind that the best mode of retaining the good opinion of others, is by continuing to deserve it. He was not, as is too often the case, spoiled by the attention he met with; but it had, on the contrary, the good effect of stimulating him to persevere in the path of duty. He knew nothing of his mother but by the letters which she periodically wrote to inquire after his welfare, and often and deeply did he lament the family feud which separated them; but he had, from his earliest years, looked upon his uncle as a father, and was obliged, in duty, to conform to his prejudices. Old O’Connor never forgot nor forgave his daughter’s indiscretion. He had been proud of her—proud of her beauty and of her accomplishments—and had looked forward with delight to the prospect of one so favoured by nature and fortune forming a brilliant alliance; for, like most men with little minds and long purses, he sighed for what wealth alone could not bestow—good family connection. In this dearest hope of his heart, she had disappointed him; and his wounded pride had converted what little affection he once had had for her, into the bitterest enmity. This feeling extended even to his innocent grandson, whom he refused on all occasions to notice, remarking that an “ill bird must have an ill brood.” But we will say no more of him or his prejudices: such feelings are as monstrous and unnatural, as, fortunately, they are rare. Mr Morton, Philip’s uncle, had made his fortune in the East Indies, and had still an interest in a large mercantile house in Calcutta, which place he had twice visited during his protegé’s school days, and while he was pursuing his studies at college, under the surveillance of an old and esteemed friend. It was Mr Morton’s intention once more to visit the East; but a severe attack of illness had shattered his constitution, and obliged him to give up all hopes of prosecuting his intention. Philip had attained the age of two-and-thirty, when alarming accounts were received of the instability of several of the great commercial houses in India. This news excited old Morton’s fears; and his anxiety on the subject had a fatal effect upon his nerves, shaken and debilitated by previous illness. He felt that he had not long to live, and, in expectation of approaching dissolution, he made his will, by which he left all he was possessed of to Philip, on condition that he took the name of Morton. He earnestly enjoined Philip to hasten to Calcutta, and, as his representative, to assist, to the utmost of his ability, the house with which he was connected, in the distress which he foresaw was impending over it. Before Philip could prepare to comply with his wishes, however, the old man became so alarmingly ill that his life was despaired of, and, though he rallied wonderfully for a time, a relapse, brought on by incautious exposure to the air, proved fatal, and Philip was left a second time fatherless. Sadly and sincerely did he mourn the loss of his affectionate and liberal protector—his earliest, his kindest, his constant friend. As soon as circumstances would allow, he hastened to fulfil his deceased uncle’s wishes, and, crossing the Channel, after a rapid equipment for his voyage, he hurried down to Portsmouth to join a ship on the point of sailing for Calcutta. The passengers were all on board, and the vessel was only waiting for a fair wind to proceed to sea. Two days afterwards, they were dashing along down Channel, with a favourable wind, with a bright sky over their heads, and with the cheering hope of a good passage. The animated and novel scene excited Philip’s admiration, and cheered his spirits. The bright and beautiful face of Nature, under an aspect so new to him; the sunbeams glancing from the crested waves; the white foam breaking under the vessel’s bow; the exhilarating sense of rapid motion, as the water hissed and rustled alongside; the rapidly-receding landmarks on the shore; and the joyous faces of the crew—all conspired to distract his thoughts for a while from the grief which had weighed down his spirits. Several of the gentlemen passengers were on deck, enjoying the beauty of the scene; but none of the ladies, of whom he heard there were three or four on board, had yet made their appearance. At eight o’clock, the steward announced, “Spirits on the table, sir;” but Philip heeded him not. Now that the first excitement of novelty was over, his thoughts reverted to the home he had so lately left, and to the dear and valued benefactor he should never see again; and he leaned sorrowfully over the gangway, to indulge his mournful retrospections. From these reveries he was soon roused, by the sound of suppressed voices close to him; and, on turning round to see whence it proceeded, he perceived, through the dim light, the figures of two of the crew stretched at full length on the deck, close to the foremost quarter-deck carronade, and under the lee of the bulwark. Now that his attention was awakened, he could distinctly hear every word of their conversation, which amused and interested him greatly, and which he considered himself perfectly justified in benefiting by, as he had given them fair warning of his proximity, by observing to them, “It’s a fine night, lads.”—and receiving the answer, “Yes, sir, it is.”

“My eyes, Bill!” said one of the recumbents, “ain’t this here a fine breeze?”

“Wait till ye sees the end on’t, Jem,” replied the other; “it’s my notion ye’ll change your tune before long.”

“Mayhap I may, Bill; but I hates to be watching the weather-glass of evil. What makes you so down in the mouth?”

“I’ll tell ye what, Jem—I don’t like this here move at all. I never seed no good come of sailing on a Friday. Why couldn’t the skipper have kept her fast by the nose for another day, ’stead of running in the very teeth of mischief in this way? I wonders as how the Admiralty doesn’t give an order agin sailing on sich an unlucky day.”

“Why, sure, Bill, you don’t call sich a breeze as this unlucky? If this is what you call Friday’s luck, I hope I may always sail on a Friday.”

“Well, we’ll see, Jem; but, if so be as you doesn’t think that there’s bad luck in a Friday, you’re out of your latitude, that’s all.”

“Watch, man the royal cluelines!” interrupted the men in their confab, and startled all the watch to their feet. The breeze was gradually freshening, and the small masts were beginning to complain; but the night was clear, and cold, and beautiful—and Philip retired to his cot, laughing at the superstitious fears of the sailor, but, at the same time, unconsciously almost to himself, affected by them. The breeze continued steady till they had cleared the Channel, and were standing to the south, when it began gradually to die away and draw a-head; and, on the night of the third day from their departure, the scene was completely changed. Thick, heavy masses of cloud had been gathering to the southward all the afternoon; cloud after cloud rearing its dark head, and then remaining stationary, like an army assembling all its forces before being put in motion. Towards night, the breeze began to freshen from the southward, and the clouds to rise slowly and sullenly, as if compelled unwillingly to tear themselves from their resting-place on the horizon, while the light “scud” drove rapidly across, high up in the heavens. A large, dull halo surrounded the moon, and her light struggled dimly and ominously through the watery and angry-looking vapours that flitted across it. Everything portended a coming storm; the ship herself seemed to be aware of the approaching conflict, plunging and rolling as if in ineffectual efforts to make her escape; while her timbers groaned and creaked, as she tossed about in the confused sea, and seemed to utter mournful cries, as the wind moaned in hollow gusts through her rigging. All the small sails were taken in, and soon the loud order to “reef topsails” was heard, followed by the rattling of blocks, the flapping of sails, and the loud cheers of the sailors, as they plied their dangerous trade aloft. The double-reefed topsails were soon set, the yards braced sharp up, and the ship stood away to the westward, throwing thick sprays over her bow, and trembling from stem to stern, as she plunged heavily into the sea, and, rising again, poured whole torrents of water from her head. Philip felt an excitement he had never before experienced, as he gazed on the scene around him. The wild, threatening sky; the angry waves, like wild beasts lashing themselves into fury; the gradually-freshening gale, howling as if in search of its prey; and the moon herself—the mild, placid moon—scowling down upon the turmoil below, with a frown upon her brow—all united to form a picture of gloom and desolation, which accorded well with his own feelings. He stayed on deck till near the end of the first watch, and was just going down to his cabin, when the second mate, whose watch it was, said to him—

“You must be cold and wet, Mr Morton. If you will wait a few minutes, till I am relieved, I shall be glad of your company in my cabin, to smoke a cigar over a glass of grog, for it is of little use turning in. This night’s work is not over yet, or I’m much mistaken.”

“Thank you,” replied Morton; “I shall be happy to join you.”

As soon as the deck was relieved, they dived below, to the snugly fitted-up cabin of the second mate, where they soon forgot the clouds above, while enveloped in clouds of their own raising below.

“It is the fashion, Mr Morton,” said Hardy, the officer, “among many of the sticklers for propriety, to rail at the use of what they have no relish for themselves, and to denounce smoking as a low and ungentlemanly practice; but, in spite of all their squeamish objections, I know nothing more soothing and refreshing, after a night of toil and excitement like this, than a mild and genuine Havannah. Surely Nature would not be so lavish of her blessings, if it had not been intended that we were to enjoy them in moderation.

“Ah! I thought so—no rest for the wicked,” continued he, starting up, as the shrill pipe of the boatswain rose far above the noise of the storm; “there it is! ‘All hands down top-gallant masts and yards!’ Finish your cigar, Mr Morton, and douce the glim when you have done. I must be off.”

“I will go, too,” said Morton; “I am too much excited to sleep.”

The night was now pitch dark, the wind had increased to a strong gale, and the ship was rolling “gunnels to,” in the long heavy sea; bright flashes of lightning, every now and then, threw a momentary glare over the gloomy heavens, and the thunder rolled in loud and long-continued peals.

“Didn’t I tell you, Jem, what ’ud come of sailing on a Friday? and we haven’t seen the end on’t yet,” said Bill Halliday, one of the men we before mentioned, as he was running up the main rigging, and a flash of lightning shewed him his messmate beside him.

“Oh, never say ‘die,’ while there’s a shot in the locker, Bill; we’ll weather many a Friday’s sailing yet.”

Just then the ship gave a heavy lurch to windward; Jem heard a loud and startling cry close beside him, and, looking downwards through the darkness, a sudden flash shewed him his messmate struggling for life on the surface of the water; he had slipped his foot, poor fellow, and, amid the roar of the waters and the howling of the gale, the noise of his plunge was unheard by those on deck. His messmate, trembling with horror, raised the cry of “A man overboard!” but, alas! in vain; in such a night and such a sea, it would have been madness to risk the lives of the many for the one. The next flash lighted the sea far and near, and all eyes were anxiously bent upon the water; but nothing was visible but the dark heaving mass, with the white foam driving over its surface; the ravenous waves had done their work quickly and mercifully.

Soon after this, as if satisfied with this sacrifice to its fury, the gale began gradually to moderate; and, before next night, the ship was again “all a-taunto,” and standing to the southward, with a leading wind, under single-reefed topsails, and topgallantsails. The following day, the weather was so fine, and the water so smooth, that the ladies, who had not hitherto ventured out of their cabins, made their appearance at the cuddy table. At dinner, Morton was seated nearly opposite to a remarkably fine turkey, and his eyes were constantly wandering in that direction, but whether for the purpose of admiring its beauties, or those of a young lady seated behind it, it was difficult to distinguish. His contemplation however, either of the dead or the living beauty, seemed to have diverted his thoughts from the indulgence of his appetite.

“Mr Morton, a glass of wine?” said the captain; “you seem to be contented with looking at that fine turkey.”

“Beautiful creature!” replied he.

“Won’t you send your plate over for some of it?”

“With all my heart,” sighed he, looking most languishingly in the direction of the turkey.

“Why, Mr Morton,” said Hardy, “you said before dinner that you had an excellent appetite; you are not giving proof of it now—I am afraid you are not well.”

Morton coloured to the eyes, and gave a faint laugh. The fact was, that he was not well; he had just been seized with a violent attack of a rather uncommon complaint, called “love at first sight.” He felt confused, he scarcely knew why, and he fancied everybody was noticing his confusion, which made him ten times worse. He laughed when he ought to have looked grave, and looked grave when he ought to have laughed, and was guilty of a thousand awkwardnesses, which attracted towards him the observation he wished to avoid. He strove manfully to look up the table, and down the table, and in every direction but that in which he wished to look; but his eyes would, somehow or another, have their own way in spite of him, and always contrived, at last, as naturally as possible, to direct their glances towards the neighbourhood of the turkey. It was with a feeling of positive relief he saw the ladies retire from the table; and no sooner were they gone than he became a rational man again, though rather more abstracted and silent than he had been before dinner.

“That was rather a nice-looking girl sitting opposite to me at dinner,” remarked he, hesitatingly and inquiringly, to his friend Hardy, after they rose from table. “Do you know who she is?”

“I have heard her name, but I forget it just now,” said the sailor; “but she is a devilish fine woman; I wonder the captain did not introduce you to her.”

“Why, so he did; but he spoke so indistinctly that I could not catch the name.”

At one bell in the second dog-watch (half-past six), the band made their appearance on deck; and no sooner were the lively strains of the music heard, than the ship’s company, always ready for “a lark,” came swarming up the hatchways, and the decks soon resounded with the sounds of the “fantastic,” but anything but “light” toe.

“Come, gentlemen,” said Captain Dickens to his passengers, “won’t you follow the good example the men are setting you? Can’t you persuade the ladies to dance? Mr Morton, here is a fair lady for you to try your powers of persuasion upon,” looking at one who was walking beside him, and who made a movement of assent in reply to Morton’s bow.