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pointing to a bedstead without curtains; press containing her wool and lint carders, the simple implements of her feeble industry, and a chest, which she said "was locked up."

'Locked up,' the Widow repeated with an air of offended feeling, as if it could not have been trusted with her open.

"And what is in it so precious," said I, "that the heir has thought you unworthy of the trust."

'Naething; naething, in it Ma'am,' replied the Widow, 'but'-lowering her voice, 'the saut that was poured out o' the plate.'

Though a frequent and familiar observer of the habits and superstitions of the poor, I am yet extremely ignorant of the meaning of many of them. I therefore, could say nothing upon this subject; only I thought, the human being with whom such a deposit was not secure from plunder, must be a person of something more than suspicious honesty; a person, in short, lost to the common feelings of our common nature-poor and depraved as it is. All this I might have thought aloud, in the hearing of the Widow, and thereby soothed a little her irritated spirit, by condemning those who had treated her so ungenerously; but I was hurt to observe, that while she had told me all

the rest of the sad story of her neighbor's death, without so much as shedding a tear, the little personal affront with which it concluded, had so evidently affected her. By every serious reflection I ventured to make, either on the dead or the living, my poor widow was alike unmoved; or if any answers were returned, it was no more than her customary, and therefore, I fear rathermechanical than devotional ejaculation, of 'the Lord fit and prepare us!—We are weak, but He is strong!'

After she had done telling me all her little affairs, her wants, and her complaints, and I had ministered to her necessities out of my own penury, I rose to take my leave; but as I opened the door to go away, she looked in my face, with an eye indeed full of pity, saying, 'But, Oh! Ma'am, have ye no seen Jeanie Douglas?—pair thing! a sair, sair heart has she!'

"What!" said I, "Is the Julia come up?" for I knew that Jemmy Douglas, the widow's nephew, was a sailor, and she had long been expecting him home; and he had promised to bring her a pound of tea, and a silk shawl, of which I had heard more than once,-"Is. the Julia come up?" I said;

'Na, na, Ma'am, the Julia's no come up; the Julia will never see the pier o' Lennoxferry ony mair!-Wae's me! for Jeanie!'

"What, is Jemmy drowned then?"

'Na, na, pair fellow! he's no drown'd, but he's dead!'

On hearing this, and much more than this, I left Mrs. Macfarlane, and following the direction she had given me, found my way down a filthy lane, which two aged men, hardly able to bear either shovel or broom, were endeav oring by means of both, to render passable. It was many years ago that I made this visit, but all the circumstances of it are yet fresh in my memory.

Jeanie Douglas had indeed, as Mrs. Macfarlane had conjectured, 'a sair, sair heart.' She had been a widow only about ten days, and the tear was wet on her cheek. Her husband, a sea-faring man, accustomed to the thoughtless and dissipated habits of a seaman's life, had a few weeks before returned from a long voyage; but instead of bringing back to his home comfort and plenty, he had returned even poorer than he went away, for he had been shipwrecked off the coast of Northumberland, almost in sight of his native shores.

The crew had been picked up by some gallant fellows in a life-boat, who, from the land, seeing the 'brig Julia,' her bow sprit lost, her sails in tatters, and her sailors perishing in the deep, boldly adventured their own lives to succour their fellow-creatures, and happily succeeded in the attempt.

But though Jeanie's husband escaped a watery grave, he had lost all his little property, and all his clothes; and, as is the case in these sad circumstances, it seems the owners of the vessel were not bound to make good his loss. But this was the least of her sorrows, for Douglas had not been at home above a fortnight, when he was seized with a contagious fever, caught in his own house, which carried him off in a few days; for he was taken ill on Monday morning, and died on the Saturday following. He left his wife with five children, one of them recovering from the same fever with which the father died, which was typhus, and two still in it. One of these children was Lily Douglas: I never saw any one so sick, so comfortless, and so unprovided for. The other was a boy. Both of them had been rubbed three times a-day with some strong and offensive unction.

The poor little boy was lying on the top of an old trunk, placed against the wall; a filthy rug was his only covering. A kind of skreen was placed between him and the door, over which was hung, by way of curtains, the tattered blue jacket, and tarry trowsers of the dead father!-his tongue was in one ulcer, and his whole mouth in a state that cannot be described.

The girl in addition to the filth with which she was covered, was bleeding under leeches, and had just had her hair cut off, that she might receive a blister on her head. The poor mother was herself an object perhaps even of deeper commiseration than her children. It was not so much the anguish of her heart, as the simplicity of her grief, that was so affecting; her head was indeed a fountain of tears, and she seemed to weep day and night for her husband, her daughter, and her little boy. Her bosom contained in itself a whole world of affection-there was no withstanding the resistless claim she made upon your sympathy-you had but to look in her face, to burst into tears

In the midst of all this wretchedness, nothing was more lamentable, than the total