Oh, woman! ye wadna be angry if ye kenned what an awfu’ thing it is to see a thousan’ een below ye, and aboon ye, and round about ye, a’ staring upon ye like condemning judges, an’ looking into your very soul—­ye hae nae idea o’ it, mother; I tell ye, ye hae nae idea o’t, or ye wadna be angry.  The very pulpit floor gaed down wi’ me, the kirk wa’s gaed round about, and I thought the very crown o’ my head wad pitch on the top o’ the precentor.  The very een o’ the multitude soomed round me like fishes!—­an’ oh, woman! are ye dumb? will ye torment me mair? can ye no speak, mother?” But he spoke to one who never spoke again.  Her reason departed, and her speech failed, but grief remained.  She had lived upon one hope, and that hope was destroyed.  Her round ruddy cheeks and portly form wasted away, and within a few weeks the neighbours, who performed the last office of humanity, declared that a thinner corpse was never wrapt in a winding sheet than Mrs. Jeffrey.  Time soothed, but did not heal the sorrows, the shame, and the disappointment of the son.  He sank into a village teacher, and often, in the midst of his little school, he would quote his first, his only text—­imagine the children to be his congregation—­attempt to proceed—­gaze wildly round for a moment, and sit down and weep.  Through these aberrations his school dwindled into nothingness, and poverty increased his delirium.  Once, in the midst of the remaining few, he gave forth the fatal text.  “My brethren!” he exclaimed, and smiting his hand upon his forehead, cried, “Speak, mother!—­speak now!” and fell with his face upon the floor.  The children rushed screaming from the school, and when the villagers entered, the troubled spirit had fled for ever.

THE LAWYER’S TALES.

THE STORY OF MYSIE CRAIG.

In detailing the curious circumstances of the following story, I am again only reporting a real law case to be found in the Court of Session Records, the turning-point of which was as invisible to the judges as to the parties themselves—­that is, until the end came; a circumstance again which made the case a kind of developed romance.  But as an end implies a beginning, and the one is certainly as necessary as the other, we request you to accompany us—­taking care of your feet—­up the narrow spiral staircase of a tenement called Corbet’s Land, in the same old town where so many wonderful things in the complicated drama—­or dream, if you are a Marphurius—­of human life have occurred.  Up which spiral stair having got by the help of our hands, almost as indispensable as that of the feet, we find ourselves in a little human dovecot of two small rooms, occupied by two persons not unlike, in many respects, two doves—­Widow Craig and her daughter, called May, euphuized by the Scotch into Mysie.  The chief respects in which they might be likened, without much stress, to the harmless creatures we have mentioned, were their love for each other,