Chapter VIII: Conclusion (3)

It was now past seven, with a clear, frosty night. What was to be done? It was manifest that the cave was betrayed--at least, that the _whereabouts_ was known--and it was likewise necessary that this information should be conveyed to the poor inmate. But where was he to find a refuge, after the cave had been vacated? It struck them, in consulting, that if they could get the old woman to be friendly and assisting, the escape might be effected before the time evidently fixed upon for taking the cave by surprise. This was, however, a somewhat dangerous experiment; for, although Tibby M'Murdo was known to be favourable--as who amongst the lower classes was not?--to the non-conformists, yet she might not choose to run the immense risk of ruin and even death, which might result from her knowingly giving harbour to a rebel. So, by way of sounding the old woman--who lived in the house by herself, her granddaughter, who was at service in the town, only visiting her occasionally--they proposed to stay all night in the house, as they were in hourly expectation of a wool-dealer who had made an appointment to meet them here, but who, owing to the heavy roads, had manifestly been detained beyond the appointed time. The old woman had various objections to this arrangement; but was at last persuaded to make an addition to her fire, to put half-a-dozen bottles of her best ale on the table, with a tappit hen, and what she termed "a wee drap o' the creature," and to retire to rest about eight o'clock, her usual hour, they having already paid for all, and promised not to leave the house till she rose in the morning. At this time, about eight o'clock, the night had suddenly became dark and cloudy, and there was a strange noise up amongst the rocks overhead. It was manifest that there was a change of weather fast approaching. At last the snow descended, the wind arose, and it became a perfect tempest. Next morning, there were three human beings in Tibby's small _ben_, busily employed in discussing the good things already purchased, as well as in higgling and bothering about the price of wool. The weather, which had been exceedingly boisterous all night, had again cleared up into frost, and the inhabitants of Monyaive were busied in cutting away the accumulated snow from their doors, when in burst old Tibby's granddaughter, and, all at once, with exceeding animation, made the following communication:--

"Ay, granny, ye never heard what has taen place this last nicht. I had it a' frae Jock Johnston. Ye ken Jock--he's oor maister's foreman, an' unco weel acquent wi' the dragoons that lodge in the Spread Eagle. Weel, Jock tells me that Lag was here last nicht, in disguise like, an' that they had gotten information, frae ane o' their spies like, aboot a cave up by yonder where some o' the puir persecuted folks is concealed; an' that, aboot ane o'clock o' this morning--an' an awsome morning it was--they had marched on, three abreast, through the drift, carrying strae alang wi' them an lighted matches; an' that they gaed straight to the cave, an' immediately summoned the puir folks to come out and be shot; and that they only answered by a groan, which tellt them as plainly as could be, that the puir creatures were there; and that they immediately set fire to the straes at the mooth o' the cave, and fairly smoked them (Jock tells me) to death. Did ye ever hear the like o't?"

"O woman!" responded the grandmother, "but that is fearfu'!--these are indeed fearfu' times; there is naebody sure o' their lives for half-an-hour thegither, wha doesna gae to hear the fushionless curates!"

At this instant, one of the dragoons drew up his horse at the door, asking if a man, such as he described, with a blue bonnet and a grey duffle coat, had returned late last night, or rather this morning, to bed. Old Tibby answered, in a quavering voice, that the man mentioned had left her house about eight o'clock, and had not yet returned. The dragoon appeared somewhat incredulous; and, giving his horse to the girl to hold, he dashed at once and boldly into the room, where the three persons already mentioned were seated. The young farmers questioned immediately the propriety of his conduct; but he drew his sword, and swore that he would make cats' meat of the first that should lay hold upon him. He had no sooner said so, than a man sprang upon him from the fireside, and, striking his sword-arm down with the poker, immediately secured his person by such means as the place and time presented. The fellow roared like a bull, blaspheming and vociferating mightily of the crime of arresting a king's soldier in the discharge of his duty. But he was hurried into a concealed bed, tied firmly down with ropes and even blankets, and made to know that, unless he was silent, he might have to pay for his disobedience with his life. When old Tibby saw how things were going on, and that her house might suffer by such transactions, she sallied forth as fast as her feeble limbs and well-worn staff would carry her, exclaiming as she went--"We'll a' be slain--we'll a' be slain!--the laird o' Lag will be here--and Clavers will be here--and the King himself will be here--an' we'll a' be murdered--we'll a' be murdered!" At this moment, the trooper appeared in his regimentals, mounted his horse, and was off at full gallop. The granddaughter, now relieved from holding the dragoon's horse, followed her grandmother, and brought her lamp to the house; but, to their infinite surprise, there was nobody there save the very cursing trooper whom she had seen so recently ride off. His voice was loud, and his complainings fearful; but neither Tibby nor her granddaughter durst go near him, as they were fully convinced that he was a devil, and no man, since he had the power at once of mounting a horse and flying rather than riding away, and, at the same time, of lying cursing and swearing in a press bed in the _ben_. At last a neighbour heard the tale, and, being less superstitions, relieved the unfortunate prisoner from his rather awkward predicament. He swore revenge, and to cut poor old Tibby into two with his sword; but he found, upon searching for his weapon, that it was absent, as well as his clothes, which had been forcibly stripped from him when he was tied--and that without leave--and that he had nothing for it but to thrust himself into canonicals--in which garb he actually walked home to his quarters, amidst the shouts of his companions, and to the astonishment of all the staring villagers.

As he was making the best of his way to hide his disgrace in the Spread Eagle, he was told that his commanding officer, Sir Robert Grierson, had been wishing to speak with him, for some time past. Upon appearing immediately in the presence of authority, he was questioned in regard to the mission on which he had been despatched, and was scarcely credited when he narrated the treatment which he had met with, and the loss which he had sustained. A detachment was immediately despatched in quest of the thief, the _wool-merchant_, who had so cleverly supplied himself with a passport from the king; and, after our soldier's person had been unrobed, and attired for the present in his stable undress, Lag set out with a few followers, to examine the cave, in order to be assured of Mr Lawson's death. "They may gallop off with our horses," said Lag, in a jocular manner, by the way; "but they will not easily gallop off with the old choked hound, who has led us so many dances over the hills of Queensberry and Auchenleck." At last, they arrived at the mouth of the cave, and entered. Black and blue, and severely bruised, lay the dead body before them. "Ah, ha!" said Lag, making his boot, as he expressed it, acquainted with old Canticle's posteriors. "Ah, ha! my fleet bird of the mountain, and we have caught you at last, and caught you _napping_--ha, ha! Why don't you speak, old fire and brimstone? What! not a word now!--and yet you had plenty when you preached from the Gouk Thorn, to upwards of two thousand of your prick-eared, purse-mouthed, canting followers. Come, my lads, we have less work to do now; we will e'en back to quarters, and drink a safe voyage into the Holy Land, to old Dumb-and-flat there!" So saying, he reined up his horse, and was on the point of withdrawing the men, when one of them, who had eyed the body, which was imperfectly seen in the dark cave, more nearly than the rest, exclaimed--"And, by the Lord Harry, and we are all at fault, and the game is off, on four living legs, after all--off and away! and we standing drivelling here, when we should be many miles off in hot pursuit of this cunning fox who has contrived to give us the slip once more."

"What means the idiot?" vociferated Grierson.

"Mean!--why, what should I mean, Sir Robert, but that this here piece of carrion is no more the stinking corpse of old Closeburn, than I am a son of the Covenant!"

It turned out, upon investigation, that this was the body of the informer Watson, who had preceded Lag to the cave during the terrible drift; had been observed by John Harkness and Sandy Gibson, who were then employed in removing Lawson to the small inn; and, after a drubbing which disabled him from moving, he had been left the only tenant of the cave. When Grierson came, as above mentioned, from the drift and the cold, as well as the beating, he was unable to speak; but his groans brought his miserable death upon him; and Lawson, by assuming the dragoon's garb and steed, was enabled to escape, and to officiate, as has been already mentioned in a former paper, for several years before his death, in his own church, from which he had been so long and so unjustly driven. Thus did it please God to punish the infamous conduct of Watson, and to enable his own servant to effect his escape. The dragoon's horse was found, one morning at day-light, neighing and beating the hoof at old Tibby's door. It soon found an owner, but told no stories respecting its late occupant, who was now snugly lodged in William Graham's parlour in the guid town of Kendal. Graham and he were cousins-german.

XVII.--THE VIOLATED COFFIN.

AN effort has, of late, been made to repel the allegations which, for past ages, have been made against the infamous instruments of cruelty during the twenty-eight years' persecution. The Covenanters have been represented as factious democrats, setting at defiance all constituted authority, and exposing themselves to the vengeance of law and justice. These sentiments are apt to identify themselves with modern politics; but we hope we will never see our country again devastated by oppression, cruelty, and all the shootings, and headings, and hangings of the Stuart despotism repeated. It becomes, therefore, the duty of every friend of good and equal government to put his hand to the work, and to support those principles under which Britain has flourished so long, and every man has sat in safety and in peace under his own vine and his own fig-tree. No train of reasoning, or of demonstration, however, will suffice for this. The judgment is, in many occasions, convinced of error and injustice, whilst the heart and the conduct remain the same. There must be something in accordance with the decisions of the judgment pressed home upon the feelings. There must be vivid pictures of the workings of a system of misrule placed before the mind's eye, so that a deep and a human interest may be felt in the picture. The reader must open the doors of our suffering peasantry, and witness their family and fireside bereavements. He must become their companion under the snow-wreath and the damp cave--he must mount the scaffold with them, and even listen to their last act and testimony. How vast is the impression which a painter can, in this way, make upon the spirit of the spectator! Let Allan's famous Circassian slave be an instance in point; but the painter is limited to a single point of time, and the relation which that bears and exhibits to what has gone before or will come after; but the writer of narrative possesses the power of shifting his telescope from eminence to eminence--of varying, _ad libitum_, time, place, and circumstances--and thus of making up for the acknowledged inferiority of written description of narratives to what is submitted, as Horace says, "_Oculis fidelibus_," by his vast and unlimited power of variety. The means, therefore, by which past generations have been made to feel and acknowledge the inhumanities, the scandalous atrocities of those blood-stained times, still remain subservient to their original and long tried purposes; and it becomes the imperious duty of every succeeding age to transmit and perpetuate the impressions of abhorrence with which those times were regarded and recollected. This duty, too, becomes so much the more necessary, as the times become the more remote. The object which is rapidly passed and distanced by the speed of the steam-engine, does not more naturally diminish in dimensions to the eye, as it recedes into the depths of distance, than do the events which, in passing, figured largely and impressively, lose their bulk and their interest when removed from us by the dim and darkening interval of successive centuries; and the only method by which their natural and universal law can be modified, or in any degree counteracted, is by a continuous and uninterrupted reference to the past--by making what is old, recent by description and imagination; and by more carefully tracing and acknowledging the connection which past agents and times have, or may be supposed to have, upon the present advancement and happiness of man. Had the devotedness of the Covenanter and Nonconformist been less entire than it was--had the arbitrary desires of a bigoted priesthood and a tyrant prince been submitted to--then had the Duke of York been king to the end of his days--Rome had again triumphed in her priesthood; and we at this hour, if at all awakened from the influence of surrounding advancement to a sense of our degradation, had been only enacting bloody Reformation, instead of bloodless Reform, and suffering the incalculable miseries which our forefathers, centuries ago, anticipated. Nay, more, but for the lesson taught us by the friends of the Covenant and the conventicle, where had been the great encouragement to resist political oppression in all time to come, when the proudly elevated finger may point to the record, which said, and still says, in letters indeed of blood--"A people resolved to be free, can never be ultimately enslaved." The Covenant had its use--and, immense in its own day, and in its immediate efforts, it placed William, and law, and freedom on the throne of Britain; but that is as nothing in the balance, when compared with the less visible and more remote effects of this distinguished triumph:--It, throughout all the last century, maintained a firm and unyielding struggle with despotism, sometimes indeed worsted, but never altogether subdued; and it has, of late years, issued in events and triumphs too recent and too agitating to be now fairly and fully discussed. Nor will the influence of the Covenant cease to be felt in our land, till God shall have deserted her, and left her entirely to the freedom of her own will, to the debasing influence of that luxury and corruption which has formed the grave of every kingdom that has yet lived out its limited period.

These Gleanings of the Covenant have been written under the impression, and with the view above expressed; and it is hoped that the following narrative, true in all its leading circumstances, and more than true in the "vraisemblable," may contribute something to the object thus distinctly stated.

The funeral of Thomas Thomson had advanced from the Gaitend to the Lakehead. The accompaniment was numerous--the group was denser. Thomas had lived respected, and died regretted. He was the father of five helpless children, all females, and his wife was manifestly about to be delivered of a sixth. Just as the procession had advanced to the house of Will Coultart, a troop of ten men rode up. They had evidently been drinking, and spoke not only blasphemously, but in terms of intimidation.--"Stop, you cursed crew," said the leader. "He has escaped law, but he shall not escape justice. Come here, lad;" and at once they alighted from their horses, seized the coffin, and opening the lid, were about to penetrate the corpse through and through. "Stop a little," said John Ferguson, the famous souter of Closeburn; "there are maybe twa at a bargain-making;" so saying, he lifted an axe which he took up at a wright's door, and dared any one to disturb them in their Christian duty. A "pell-mell" took place, in the midst of which poor Ferguson was killed. He had two sons in the company, who, seeing how their father had been used, rushed upon the dragoons, and were both of them severely wounded. In the meantime, Douglas of Drumlanrig came up, and, understanding how things went, ordered the soldiers to give in, and the wounded men to be taken care off. All this was wondrous well; but what follows is not so. The body of Ferguson was carried to Croalchapel; and the two sons accompanied it, with many tears. Douglas seemed to feel what had happened, and could not avoid accompanying the party home. He entered the house of mourning, where there was a dead father, a weeping widow, and two wounded sons. He entered, but he saw nothing but Peggy. Poor Peggy was an only sister of these lads--an only daughter of her murdered father. Douglas was a man of the world! Oh, my God, what a term that is! and how much misery and horror does it not contain. Peggy was really beautiful; not like Georgina Gordon, or Lady William, or Mrs Norton, or Lady Blessington; for her beauty depended in no degree upon art. Had you arrayed her in rags, and placed her in a poor's-house, she would have appeared to advantage. Peggy, too, (the God who made her knows,) was pure in soul, and innocent in act as is the angel Gabriel! she never once thought of sinning, as a woman may, and does (sometimes) sin; she lived for her father, whom she loved--and for her mother, whom she did not greatly dislike. But her mother was a stepmother, and Peggy liked her father. Guess, then, her grief, when Peggy saw her father murdered, her brothers wounded, and knew the cause thereof. "Lift her," said Douglas to his men, after he had, in seeming humanity, seen the corpse and brothers home; "lift her into Red Hob's saddle, and carry her to Drumlanrig." No sooner said than done. The weeping, screaming girl was lifted into the saddle, and conveyed, per force, to Drumlanrig. At that gate there stood a figure clothed in dyed garments. It was the elder brother of Peggy, he who had been least injured of the two. He stood with his sword in his hand, and dared any one who would conduct his sister into the abode of dishonour. Douglas snapped, and then fired a pistol at him, but neither took effect. In the meantime, the brother was secured, and the sister was carried into the "Blue Room," well known afterwards as the infamous sleeping-chamber of old "Q." The not less infamous, though ultimately repentant Douglas, advanced into the chamber. The poor girl seemed as if she had seen a snake; she shrunk from his approach and from his blandishments. She had previously opened the window into the green walk; she had taken her resolve, and, in a few instants, lay a maimed, almost mangled being, on the beautiful walks of Drumlanrig. Douglas was manifestly struck by the incident, but not converted. He took sufficient care to have the poor girl conveyed home, and to have the brothers provided for, but his hour was not yet come. It was not till after his frequent conversations with the minister of Closeburn, that he came to a proper sense of his horrible conduct. But what was the awful devastation of this family. The poor beauteous flower Peggy, who was about to have been married to a farmer's son, (Kirkpatrick of Auchincairn,) was by him rejected. He called at the house sometime afterwards, with a view to see her; but he came full of suspicion, and therefore unwilling to receive the truth. He had heard the whole story, and must have known that his Peggy was at least as pure in mind as she had been beautiful in person; but he belonged not naturally to the noble stock of the family to which he was to have been allied, and gave himself up to prejudice. The girl was still in bed, to which, from her bruises, she had been confined for months. The meeting might have been one which a poet would have gloried in describing, or a painter in delineating and embellishing, with hues stolen from the arc of Heaven! Alas! it was one only worthy of the pencil of a Ribera--fraught with cruelty, and abounding in selfishness and dishonour. The girl, as she turned her pale yet beautiful face on him, told him the truth, and watched, with tears in her eyes, the effect of her narrative on one whose image had never been absent from her mind, if indeed it had not supported her in her struggle, and nerved her to the purpose which preferred death to dishonour. Her bruises and wounds spoke for her, and, to any one but her lover, would have proved that he was a part of the object of her sacrifice. It was all to no purpose. The eloquence of truth, of love, of nature, were lost upon him; nothing would persuade him that the object of his love had not been degraded. He turned a cold glance of doubt upon her, and turned to leave the room. Peggy rushed out of bed, and, maimed and weak as she was, would have stopped him. Her energies failed her--her lover was gone; and her mother, roused by the cries of her pain, came and assisted her again into bed. Poor Peggy heard no more of Kirkpatrick. She sickened and died?--no! far worse!--she became desperate, married a blackguard, and lived a drunkard; the sons were banished for firing at Douglas, as he passed in his carriage through Thornhill; and the poor mother of the whole family became--shall I tell it I--an object of charity! Thus was, to my certain knowledge, at least to that of my ancestors, a most creditable and well-doing family ruined, root and branch, by the persecutors--or, in other words, by those who, without knowing what they did, regarded the "Covenant" as an unholy thing, and fought the foremost in the ranks of oppression and uniformity.

Now, there is not a word of this in Woodrow, or Burns, or even in the MS. of the Advocate's Library; and yet we can assure the reader, that the material facts are as true as is the death of Darnley, or the murder of Rizzio! God bless you, madam! you have, and can have, and ought to have no notion whatever of the united current of _horribility_, which ran through the whole ocean of cruelty during these awful and most terrific times! May the God that made, the Saviour that redeemed, and the Holy Spirit that prepares us for heaven, make us thankful that in _those times_ we do not live; and that such men as Woodrow and Burns (the first and the last) have been raised up, to vindicate and to justify such men as then suffered in their families, or in their persons, for the covenanted cause of the Great Head of our Presbyterian Church!

THE SURGEON'S TALES.

THE MONOMANIAC.

In some of my prior papers, I have had occasion to make some oblique references to that disease called _pseudoblepsis imaginaria_--in other words, a vision of objects not present. Cullen places it among local diseases, as one of a depraved action of the organs contributing to vision; whereby, of course, he would disjoin it from those cases of madness where a depraved action of the brain itself produces the same effect. In this, Cullen displays his ordinary acuteness; for we see many instances where there is a fancied vision of objects not present, without insanity; and, indeed, the whole doctrine of spirits has latterly been founded on this distinction.[2] From the very intimate connection, however, which exists between the visual organs and the brain itself, it must always be a matter of great difficulty--if indeed, in many cases, it be not entirely impossible--to make the distinction available; for there are cases--such as that of the conscience-spectre, and those that generally depend upon thoughts and feelings of more than ordinary intensity--that seem to lie between the two extremes of merely diseased visual organs and diseased brains; and, in so far as my experience goes, I am free to say that I have seen more cases of imaginary visions of distant objects, resulting from some terrible excitement of the emotions, than from the better defined causes set forth by the medical writers. Among the passions and emotions, again, that in their undue influence over the sane condition of the mind, are most likely to give rise to the diseased vision of _phantasmata_, I would be inclined to place that which usually exerts so much absorbing power over the young female heart. The cause lies on the surface. In the case of the passions--of anger, revenge, fear, and so forth--the feeling generally works itself out; and, in many cases, the object is so unpleasant that the mind seeks relief from it, and flies it; while, in the emotions of love, there is a morbid brooding over the cherished image that takes hold of the fancy; the object is called up by the spell of the passion placed before the mind's eye, and held there for hours, days, and years, till the image becomes almost a stationary impression, and is invested with all the attributes of a real presence. I do not feel that I would be justified in saying that I am able to substantiate the remark I have now made by many cases falling under my own observation; the examples of _monomania_ in sane persons are not very often to be met with; and I have heard many of my professional brethren say, that they never experienced a single instance in all their practice.

The case I am now to detail, occurred within two miles of the town of ----. The patient was a lady, Mrs C----, an individual of a nervous, irritable temperament, and possessed of a glowing fancy, that, against her will, brought up by-past scenes with a distinctness that was painful to her. She had lately returned from India, whither she had accompanied her husband, whom she left buried in a deep, watery grave in the channel of the Mozambique. I had been attending her for a nervous ailment, which had shattered her frame terribly, while it increased the powers of her creative fancy, as well as the sensibility by which the mental images were invested with their chief powers over her. She suffered also from a tenderness in the _retina_, which forced her to shun the light. How this latter complaint was associated with the other, I cannot explain, unless upon the principle which regulates the connection between the sensibility of the eye and the heated brains of those who labour under inflammation of that organ. I was informed by her mother, Mrs L----, as well as her sister, that she had come from India a perfect wreck, both of mind and body; and, for a period of eighteen months afterwards, could scarcely be prevailed upon to see any of her friends--shutting herself up for whole days in her room, the windows of which were kept dark, to prevent the light, which operated like a sharp sting, from falling upon her irritable eyes. It was chiefly with a view to the removal of this opthalmic affection, that I was requested to visit her; and I could very soon perceive, that the visionary state of her mind was closely connected with the habit of dark seclusion to which she was necessitated to resort, for the purpose of avoiding the pain produced by the rays of the sun. On my first interview, I found her sitting alone in the darkened room, brooding over thoughts that seemed to exert a strong influence over her; but she soon joined me in a conversation which, diverging from the subject of her complaint, embraced topics that brought out the peculiarity of her mind--a strong enthusiastic power of portraying scenes of grief which she had witnessed, and which, as she proceeded, seemed to rise before her with almost the vividness of presence; yet, with her, judgment was as strong and healthy as that of any day-dreamer among the wide class of mute poets, of whom there are more in the world than of philosophers.

I could not detect properly her ailment, and resolved to question her mother alone.

"Did you not notice anything peculiar about my daughter?" she said.

"The love of a shaded room, resulting from an irritability in the organs of sight, is to me no great rarity," I replied.

"Though her fit has not been upon her," rejoined she, with an air of melancholy, "it is not an hour gone since her scream rung shrilly through this house, as if she had been in the hands of fiends; and, to be plain with you, I left you to discover yourself what may be too soon apparent. I fear for her mind, sir."

"I have seen no reason for the apprehension; but her scream, was it not bodily pain?"

"I could wish that it had been mere bodily pain; but it was not. You have not heard Isabella's history," she continued, in a low, whispering tone. "She has experienced what might have turned the brain of any one. I discovered something extraordinary in her about six months ago. One evening, when the candles were shaded for the relief of her eyes, and I and Maria were sitting by her, she stopped suddenly in the midst of our conversation, and sat gazing intensely at something between her and the wall; pointing out her finger, her mouth open, and scarcely drawing her breath. I was terror-struck; for the idea immediately rushed into my mind, that it was a symptom of insanity; but I had no time for thought--a scream burst from her, and she fell at my feet in a faint. When she recovered, she told us that she had seen, in the shaded light of the candle, which assumed the blue tinge of the moonlight, the figure of a dead body sitting upright in the waters, with the sailcloth in which he was committed to the deep wrapped around him, and his pale face directed towards her. At the recollection of the vision, she shuddered, would not recur to the subject again, but betrayed otherwise no wandering of the fancy. Several times since, the same object has presented itself to her; and, what is extraordinary, it is always when the candle is shaded; yet she exhibits the same judgment, and I could never detect the slightest indication of a defect in the workings of her mind. I sent for you to treat her eyes, and left it to you to see if you could discover any symptoms of a diseased mind."

"Was the object she thus supposes present to her, ever exposed in reality to the true waking sense?" said I, suspecting a case of _monomania_.

"Did she not tell you?" rejoined she. "Come."

And leading me again into her daughter's darkened apartment, she whispered something in her ear, retired, and left us together.

"Your mother informs, me, madam," said I, "that you have seen _what exists not_; and I am anxious, from professional reasons, to know from yourself whether I am to attribute it to the creative powers of an active fancy, or to an affection of the visual organs, that I have read more of than I have witnessed."

She started, and I saw I had touched a tender part--probably that connected with her own suspicions that her mother and sister deemed her insane.

"It was for this purpose, then, that you have been called to see me?" she replied, hastily. "It is well; I shall be tested by one who at least is not prejudiced. My mother and sister think that I am deranged. I need not tell you that I consider myself sane, although I confess that this illusion of the sense, to which I am subjected, makes me sometimes suspicious of myself. Will you listen to my story?"

I replied that I would; and thus she began:--

Experience, sir, is a world merely to those who live in it--it exists not--its laws cannot be communicated to the heart of youth; the transfusion of the blood of the aged into the veins of the young to produce wisdom, is not more vain than the displacing of the hopes of the young mind by the cold maxims of what man has felt, trembled to feel, and wished he could have anticipated, that he might have been prepared for it. Such has ever been, such is, such will ever be, the history of the sons and daughters of Adam. What but the changes into which I--still comparatively a young woman--have passed--not, it would almost seem, mutations of the same principle, but rather new states of existence--could have wrung from a heart, where hope should still have lighted her lamp, and illuminated my paths, these sentiments of a dearly purchased experience? When I and George Cunningham, my schoolfellow, my first and last lover, and subsequently my husband, passed those brilliant days of youth's sunshine among the green holms and shaggy dells of ----; following the same pursuits--conning the same lessons--indulging in the same dreams of future happiness, and training each other's hearts into a community of feeling and sentiment, till we seemed one being, actuated by the same living principle: in how happy a state of ignorance of those changes that awaited me in the world, did I exist? I would fall into the hackneyed strain of artificial fiction writing, were I to portray the pleasures of a companionship and love that had its beginning in the very first impulses of feeling; with a view to set off by contrast the subsequent events that awaited us, when our happiness should have been realized.

When a woman of sensibility says she loves a man, she has told, through a medium that works out the conditions of the responding powers of our common nature, the heart, more than all the eulogistic eloquence of the tongue could achieve, to show the estimate she forms of the qualities of the object of her affections; but when she adds that that love originated in the friendship of children, grew with the increase of the powers of mind and body, and entered as a part into every feeling that actuated the young hearts, she has expressed the terms of an endearment so pure, tender, exclusive, and lasting, that it transcends all the ordinary forms of the communion of spirits on earth. The attachment is different from all others--it stands by itself; and to endeavour to conceive its purity and force by any factitious mixture of friendship, and the ordinary endearments of limited time and favourable circumstances of meeting, would be as vain as all hypothetical investigation into the nature of feeling must ever be. I cannot tell when I first knew the young man whose name I have mentioned under an emotion that shakes my frame; the syllables were a part of my early lispings, and I cannot yet think that they are unconnected with a being that has now no local habitation upon earth. Our parents were intimate neighbours; and the woods and waters of ----, if their voices--sweeter than articulated intelligence--could imitate the accents of man, would tell best when they wooed us into that communion, which they cherished, and witnessed, with an apparent participation of our joy, to open into an early affection. The power of mutual objects of pleasure and interest, especially if they are a part of the lovely province of nature--the rural landscape, secluded and secreted from the eyes of all the world besides, with its dells and fountains, birds and flowers--in increasing the attachment of young hearts, has been often observed and described; but we felt it. These inanimate objects are generally, and were to us, not only a tie, but they shared a part of our love, as if in some mysterious way they had become connected with, and a part of us. The often imputed association of ideas is a poor and inadequate solution of this work of nature: it is the effect put for the cause; the common, boasted philosophy of man, who invents terms of familiar sound to explain secrets eternally hidden from him. If we who felt, as few have ever felt, the influence of these green, umbrageous shades--with their nut-trees, bushes, flowers, and gowany leas; their singing birds, and nests with speckled eggs; their half-concealed fountains of limpid water, and running streams, and beds of white pebbles--in nourishing and increasing our young loves, could not tell how or why they were invested with such power; the philosopher, I deem, may resign the task, and say, with a sigh, that it was nature, and nature alone, who did all this; and the secret will remain unexplained.

We enjoyed ten years of this intercourse--I calculate from the fifth to the fifteenth year of our youth--and every one of these years, as it evolved the ripening powers of our minds, so it strengthened the mingling affections of our hearts. We became lovers long before we knew the sanctions and rights, and duties of pledged faith; we were each other's by a troth, a thousand times spoken; exchanged and felt in the throbbing embrace, the burning sighs, and the eloquent looks, that were but the natural impulses of a feeling we rejoiced in, yet scarcely comprehended. My heart, recoiling from the thoughts of after years, luxuriates in the memory of these blissful hours; and, were not the theme exhausted a thousand times by the eloquence of rapt feeling, speaking with the tongue of inspiration, I could dwell on these early rejoicings of unsullied spirits for ever.

My dream was not scattered--it was only changed in its form and hues, when my youthful betrothed was removed from home, to go through a course of navigation to fit him for the service of the sea, to which the intentions of his father, and his own early wishes, led him. I could have doubted my existence sooner than the faith of his heart; and he was only gone to make those preparations for attaining a position in society that would enable him to realize those fond and bright prospects we had indulged in contemplating among the woods that resounded to pledges exchanged in the face of heaven. The first place of his destination was London, from whence, for a period of about three years, I heard from him regularly by letters, which breathed with an increased warmth the same sentiments we had repeated and interchanged so often during the long period of our prior intercourse. Some time after this, he sailed to India; then were my thoughts first tinged by the changing hues of solitude; and my hopes and fears bound to the wayward circumstances of a world which had as yet been to me a paradise.

I heard nothing from him for two long years after he left London. A portrayment of my thoughts during that period would be a thousand times more difficult than for the painter to seize and represent the changing hues of the gem that, thrown on a tropic strand, reflects the endless hues of the earth and sky. I trembled and hoped by turns but every idea and every feeling were so strongly mingled with reminiscences of former pleasures, the prospects of future happiness, the fears of a change in his affections, or of his death, that I could not pronounce my mind as being, at any given moment, aught but a medium of impressions that I could not seize or fix, so as to contemplate myself. All I can say is, that he was the presiding genius of every emotion with which my heart was influenced; and, to those who have loved, that may be sufficient to shew the utter devotion of every pulse of my being to the deified image enshrined within my bosom. Now came the period of the realizing of my dreams. George Cunninghame came back, and married me.

We had scarcely been two months married when my husband, whom I loved more and more every day, got, by the influence of powerful friends, the command of a large vessel--the _Griffin_--engaged in the trade to India. It was arranged that I should accompany him, that, as we had been associated from our earliest infancy, (our separation had been only that of the body, and interfered not with the union of the immaterial essence), we should still be together. In this resolution I rejoiced; and, though by nature a coward, my love overcame all my terrors of the great deep. The day was fixed for our departure. A lady passenger and two servants were to go with us to the Cape, from whose society I expected pleasure; and every preparation which love could suggest was made to render me happy. We left the Downs on a calm day of December, and went down the Channel with a rattling gale from the north. Life on board of an Indiaman has been a thousand times described; and, would to heaven I had nothing to detail but the ordinary conduct of civilized men! Our chief officer was one Crawley, and our second a person of the name of Buist--the only individual my husband had no confidence in being Hans Kreutz, the steward, a German, who was whispered to have been engaged as a maritime venatic, or pirate, in the West Indies: and, if any man's character might be detected in his countenance, this foreigner's disposition might have been read in lineaments marked by the graver of passion. Part of what I have now said may have been the result of after experience; yet I could perceive shadowings of evil at this time, which I had not the knowledge of human nature to enable me to turn to any account.

With a series of gentle breezes and fine weather, we came to the Cape, where Mrs Hardy and her two servants were put ashore. One of the servants had agreed to accompany me to Madras, and was to have come on board again, to join us, before we left Table Bay. Whether she had changed her mind, or been detained by some unforeseen cause, I know not, but the boat came off without her; and all the information that I could get was, that she was not to be found. I trembled to be left on board of a vessel without a female companion, and strongly insisted upon George to delay his departure until another effort should be made to endeavour to find a servant in Cape Town; but, a favourable wind having sprung up at that moment, Crawley remonstrated, in his peculiar mode of abject petitioning; and my husband, having himself seen the advantage of seizing the favourable opportunity for taking and accomplishing the passage of the Mozambique, we departed, under a stiff gale; and, in a short time, reached the middle of that famous Channel, where the fears of the seamen have been so often excited by the reputed cannibalism of the natives of Madagascar. At this time I was strangely beset by nightly visions of terror, which I could impute to no other cause than the stories that George had repeated to me of the wild character of these savages. During the day, but more especially during the blue, sulphurous, flame-coloured twilight of that region--I often fixed my eye on the long, dark, umbrageous coast--followed the ranges of receding heights--threaded the deep recesses of the valleys, that seemed to end in dark caves, and peopled every haunt with festive savages performing their unholy rites over a human victim, destined to form food for creatures bearing that external impress of God's finger which marks the lords of the creation. Those visions were always connected, in some way, with myself; and I could not banish the idea, which clung to me with a morbid power of adherence, that I might, alone and unprotected, be cast into some of these cimmerian recesses, and be subjected to the unutterable miseries of a fate a thousand times worse than death, and what might follow death, by the usages of of eaters of human beings. There was no cause for any such apprehensions; and I am now satisfied that these dark creations of my fancy were in some mysterious way connected with a disordered state of my physical economy; but I was not then aware of such predisposing causes of mental gloom, and still brooded over my imagined horrors, till I drove rest and sleep from my pillow, and disturbed my husband with my pictured images of a danger that he said was far removed from me. From him I got some support and relief; but the faces of the men I saw around me, and especially those of Crawley and Kreutz, seemed, to me, rather to reflect a corroboration of my fears, than to afford me encouragement and support. The grim visions retained their power over me; and, the wind having fallen off almost to a dead calm, I found myself fixed in the very midst of the scenes that thus nourished and perpetuated them. The depression of mind produced by these frightful day-dreams and nightmares, made me sickly and weak. I could scarcely take any food; every piece of flesh presented to me, reminded me of the feasts of the inhabitants of that dark, dismal island that lay stretching before me in the vapours of a tropical climate, like a land of enchantment called up by fiends from the great deep; the dyspeptic nausea of sickness was the very food of my gloomy thoughts; and the co-operative powers of mind and body tended to the increase of my misery, till I seemed a victim of confirmed hypochondria.

We were still fixed immovably in the same place: all motive powers seemed to have forsaken the elements--the sea was like a sheet of glass, the sails hung loose from the masts, and the men lay listless about, overcome with heat, and yawning in lethargy. It was impossible to keep me below. I required air to keep me breathing, and felt a strange melancholy relief from fixing my eyes on the very scene of my terrors. Every effort to occupy my mind was vain; and I lay, for hours at a time, with my eyes fixed on the shore, piercing the deep, wooded hollows, following the faint traces of the savages as they disappeared among the thick trees, and investing every naked demon with all the characteristics of the followers of the mysterious midnight rites in which I conceived they engaged when the hour of their orgies came. I often saw individuals--rendered gigantic by the magnifying medium of the thick vapour--come down to the beach, and fix their gaze on us for a time, and then pace back again to the wooded recesses. Sometimes, when unable to sleep, I crept up from the cabin, and sat and surveyed the silent scene around me--the hazy moon, throwing her thick beams over the calm sea--the dark shadows of unknown birds sailing slowly through the air, and uttering at intervals sounds I had never heard before--the fires of the inhabitants among the trees on the coast, that sent up a long column of red light through the atmosphere, and exhibited the flitting bodies of the naked beings as they danced round the objects of their rites. It is impossible for me, by any language of which I have the power, to convey an adequate conception of my feelings during these hours. They were realities to me; and, therefore, whatever may be said against fanciful creations, I have a right to claim attention to states of the mind and feelings that belong to our nature in certain positions. At a late hour one night, I was engaged in those gloomy watchings and reveries, when Kreutz came to me, and said the captain had been taken suddenly ill. I turned my eyes from the scene along the shore I was surveying, and fixed them for a moment on his face, where the light of the moon sat in deep contrast with the long bushy hair that flowed round his temples. A shudder--that might have been accounted for from the state of my mind and the nature of the communication he had made to me, but which I instinctively attributed, at the time, to the expression of his face--passed over me, and, starting up, I hurried into the cabin off the cuddy, where I found George under the grasp of relentless spasms of the chest and stomach. He was stretched along on the floor, grasping the carpet, which he had wound up into a coil, and vomiting violently into a bason which he had hurriedly seized before he fell.

'Good God, Isabella!' he exclaimed, 'what is this? I am dying. That villain Cr ----'

And, whether from weakness or prudence, he stopped, with the guttural sound of these two letters, Cr, which applied equally to Crawley as to Kreutz, and left me in doubt which of them he meant. At this moment Buist the mate entered the cabin; and my agitation and the necessity of affording relief to the sufferer, took my mind off the fearful subject hinted at by the broken sentence I had heard. With the assistance of Buist, I got him placed on the bed. There was no doctor on board, and I was left to the suggestions of my own mind, for adopting means to save him. These were applied, but without imparting any relief. The painful symptoms continued, and he got every moment worse. Neither Crawley nor Kreutz appeared; and when Buist went out to bring what was deemed necessary for the patient, I hung over him, and asked him what he conceived to have been the cause of his illness; but my question startled him--he looked up wildly in my face; his mind was directed towards heaven; and the means of salvation through the redeeming influence of a believed divinity of Him who died on the cross, was the subject alone on which he would speak. The scene, at this moment, around me was extraordinary, and, though I cannot say I had any distinct perception of the individual circumstances that combined to make up the sum of my horrors, I can now see, as through a dark medium, the co-operating elements. There was no candle in the cabin; the light of the moon through the windows filling the apartment with a blue glare, and tinging his pallid face with its hues. My mind, wrought up by the dreamy visions I had indulged in previously, and labouring under a disease which imparted to every feeling its own eliminated gloom, saw even the darkest circumstances of my condition in a false and unnatural aspect. The scenes of our youth and early love; the impressions of the religious sentiments he was muttering in broken snatches; the view of his approaching death; the dark means by which it was accomplished; my condition after he should die, in the power of men I feared; the orgies of the natives I had been contemplating; the deep grave, so fearful in its dead calmness; and the monsters that revelled in it, to which he would be consigned--all flitted through my brain; but with such rapidity--driving out, by short energies, the more engrossing thoughts concerned in the manner of his recovery--that I could not particularize them, while I drew, by some synthetic process of the mind, their general attributes, and thus increased the terror of the scene.