Winter 1684-5 was, like the last, cold, frosty, and stormy. The ice was

on lake and muir from new year's day till the month of March. Curling

was then, as it is still, the great winter amusement in the south and

west of Scotland. The ploughman lad rose by two o'clock of a frosty

morning, had the day's fodder threshed for the cattle, and was on the

ice, besom in hand, by nine o'clock. The farmer, after seeing things

right in the stable and the byre, was not long behind his servant. The

minister left his study and his M.S., his concordance, and his desk, for

the loch, and the rink, and the channel-stane. Even the laird himself

was not proof against the temptation, but often preferred full twelve

hours of rousing game on the ice, to all the fascinations of the drawing

or the billiard-room, or the study. Even the schoolmaster was incapable

of resisting the tempting and animating sound; and, at every peal of

laughter which broke upon his own and his pupils' ears, turned his eyes

and his steps towards the window which looked upon the adjoining loch;

and, at last, entirely overcome by the shout over a contested shot; off

he and his bevy swarmed, helter-skelter, across the Carse Meadow, to the

ice. From all accounts which I have heard of it, this was a notable

amongst many notable days. The factor was never in such play; the master

greatly outdid himself; the laird played hind-hand in beautiful style;

and Sutor John came up the rink "like Jehu in time o' need." Shots were

laid just a yard, right and left, before and behind the tee; shots were

taken out, and run off the ice with wonderful precision; guards, that

most ticklish of all plays, were rested just over the hog-score, so as

completely to cover the winner; inwicks were taken to a hair, and the

player's stone whirled in most gracefully, (like a lady in a country

dance), and settled, three-deep-guarded, upon the top of the tee. Chance

had her triumphs as well as good play. A random shot, driven with such

fury that the stone rebounded and split in two, deprived the opposite

side of four shots, and took the game. The sky was blue as indigo, and

the sun shot his beams over the Keir Hills in penetrating and

invigorating splendour. Old women frequented the loch with baskets; boys

and young lads skated gracefully around; the whisky-bottle did its duty;

and even the herons at the spring-wells had their necks greatly

elongated by the roaring fun. It was a capital day's sport. Little did

this happy scene exhibit of the suffering and the misery which was all

this while perpetrated by the men of violence. Clavers, the

ever-infamous, was in Wigtonshire with his Lambs; Grierson was lying in

his den of Lag, like a lion on the spring; Johnstone was on the Annan;

and Winram on the Doon; whilst Douglas was here, and there, and

everywhere, flying, like a malevolent spirit, from strath to strath, and

from hill to dale. The snow lay, and had long been lying, more than a

foot deep, crisp and white, over the bleak but beauteous wild; the sheep

were perishing for want of pasture; and many poor creatures were in

absolute want of the necessaries of life. (The potato, that true friend

of the people, had not yet made its way to any extent into Scotland).

Caves, dens, and outhouses were crowded with the persecuted flock. The

ousted ministers were still lifting up their voice in the wilderness,

and the distant hum of psalmody was heard afar amongst the hills, and by

the side of the frozen stream and the bare hawthorn. What a contrast did

all this present to the fun, frolic, and downright ecstacy of this day's

sport! But the night came, with its beef and its greens, and its song,

and its punch, and its anecdote, and its thrice-played games, and its

warm words, and its half-muttered threats, and its dispersion about

three in the morning.

"Wha was yon stranger?" said John Harkness to Sandy Gibson, as they met

next day on the hill. "I didna like the look o' him; an' yet he played

his stane weel, an' took a great lead in the conversation. I wish he

mayna be a spy, after a'; for I never heard o' ony Watsons in

Ecclefechan, till yon creature cast up."

"Indeed," said lang Sandy, "I didna like the creature--it got sae fou

an' impudent, late at nicht; an' then that puir haverel, Will Paterson,

cam in, an' let oot that the cave at Glencairn had been surprised, an'

the auld minister murdered. If it be na the case--as I believe it isna

hitherto--there was enough said last nicht to mak it necessary to hae

the puir, persecuted saint informed o' his danger."

"An' that's as true," responded John; "an' I think you an' I canna do

better than wear awa wast o'er whan the sun gaes down, an' let honest

Mr Lawson ken that his retreat is known. That Watson creature--didna ye

tent?--went aff, wi' the curate, a wee afore the lave; they were heard

busy talking together, in a low tone of voice, as they went hame to the

manse. I wonder what maks the laird--wha is a perfect gentleman, an' a

friend, too, o' the Covenanted truth--keep company, on the ice, or off

it, wi' that rotten-hearted, roupit creature, the curate o' Closeburn?"

"Indeed," replied the other, "he is sae clean daft aboot playing at

channel-stane, that, I believe, baith him, an' the dominie, an' the

factor--forby Souter Ferguson--would play wi' auld Symnie himself,

provided he was a keen and a guid shot! But it will be mirk dark--an'

there's nae moon--ere we mak Glencairn cave o't."

John Harkness and Sandy Gibson arrived at Monyaive, in Glencairn, a

little after dark. The cave was about a mile distant from the town; and,

with the view of refreshment, as well as of concerting the best way of

avoiding suspicion, they entered a small ale-house kept by an old woman

at the farther end of the bridge. They were shewn into a narrow and

meanly-furnished apartment, and called for a bottle of the best beer,

with a suitable accompaniment of bread and cheese. The landlady,

by-and-by, was sent for, and was asked to partake of her own beverage,

and questioned, in a careless and incidental manner, respecting the

news. She looked somewhat embarrassed; and, fixing her eyes upon a

keyhole, in a door which conducted to an adjoining apartment, she said,

in a whisper--

"I ken brawly wha ye are, an maybe, too, what ye're after; but ye hae

need to be active, lads; for there are those in that ither room that

wadna care though a yer heads, as well as those o' some ither folks that

shall be nameless were stuck on the West Port o' Edinbro."

In an instant, the two young farmers were _butt_ the house, and beside

Tibby Haddow's peat fire. In the course of a short, and, to all but

themselves, an inaudible conversation, they learned that Lag himself,

disguised as a common soldier, was in the next room, in close colloquy

with a person clothed in grey duffle, with a broad bonnet on his head.

From the description of the person, the two Closeburnians had no manner

of doubt that the information obtained last night, in regard to the

existence of a place of refuge in Glencairn, was now in the act of being

communicated.

"At one o'clock!" said a well-known voice--it was that of Lag, to a

certainty.

"Yes, at one," responded the stranger, Watson--whose voice was equally

well-known to the farmers--"at one!" And they parted--the one going

east, and the other west--and were lost in the darkness of night.

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.

Two hours passed, and every moment made it more apparent that my husband

was posting to death. There was no sound heard throughout the ship

except the dull tread of the watch; and, at intervals, the whispers of

Crawley, as he communed stealthily with Buist, who went out of the cabin

repeatedly, to carry intelligence of the state of the sufferer. For

about three quarters of an hour he had been raving wildly. The detached

words he uttered raised, by their electric power, the working of my

fancy which filled up, by a train of thoughts scarcely more within the

province of reason, the chain of his wandering ideas. No connected

discourse on the subject of his illness, though mixed up with all the

reminiscences of an affection that had lasted since the period of

infancy, or the prospects that awaited me in the unprecedented position

in which I was about to be thrown, could have distracted me in the

manner effected by these insulated vocables, wrung by madness from

expiring life and reason. They ring in my ears even yet, when the beams

of the moon shine through the casements; and, even now, I think I see

that dimly lighted cabin, and my husband lying before me in the agonies

of death. I became, as if by some secret sympathy, as much deranged as

himself. As I watched him, I cast rapid looks around me--out upon the

still deep, in the direction of the fearful island--upon the articles of

domestic use lying in confusion, and exhibiting dimly-illuminated sides

and dark shades. It seemed to me some frightful dream; and, when I

turned my eyes again on the pale face which had been the object of my

excited fancy for so many years, saw the struggles of expiring nature,

and heard the wild accents that still came from his parched lips, I

screamed, and tore my hair in handfuls from my head. In that condition,

I saw him die; and the increase of my frenzy, produced by that

consummation of all evils, made me rush out, and forward to the side of

the ship. I felt all the stinging madness of the resolution to die--to

fly from the man who, I feared, had murdered him--to escape from that

island of cannibals, where I thought I would be left by my relentless

foes, by plunging into the deep, when Crawley, who had heard of his

demise, seized me, and dragged me back.

This paroxysm was succeeded by a kind of stupor that seized my whole

mind and body. I sat down on a cot in the side of the cabin, and saw

Kreutz bring in a light. The glare of it startled me; but it was only as

a vision that could not awake the sleeper. They proceeded to lay out my

husband on a table. They undressed him--for his clothes were still on;

and I saw them take a large sheet, wrap it round him, and pin it firmly

at all the folds. When their labours were finished, they took each a

large portion of brandy, and Crawley came forward and offered me a

portion. I had no power to push it from me. He held it to my mouth; but

my lips were motionless; and, tossing it off himself, he and the others

went out of the cabin. No precaution was taken to keep me within; but

the frenzy that had previously impelled me to self-destruction had

subsided, and I shuddered at what a few moments before appeared to me to

be a source of relief. I sat for hours in the position in which they

left me, gazing upon the dead body before me, but without the energy to

rise and look at the features of him who had formed the object of my

earliest devotions, the subject of all my fondest dreams of early youth

and matured womanhood, now lying there lifeless. I had scarcely, during

that period, consciousness of any object, but of a long, white figure

extended on the table, with the moonlight reflected from it. The stupor

left me--I cannot tell at what hour; and the first movement of living

energy in my brain was a stinging impulse to rush forward and seize the

body. I obeyed it, without a power to resist; and, tearing off the

folds, laid bare the face, which was as placid as I had ever seen it,

when, watching over him, I used to steal a look of him, during the hours

of night, as he slept by my side, in the moonlight that stole through

the cabin-window. In my agony, I clung to him--kissed the cold

lips--called out 'George! George!'--threw the folds of the sheet over

the face--again looked round me for some one to comfort me--felt the

consciousness of my perilous position--and, as a kind of refuge from the

despair that met me on every hand, withdrew again the folds, and acted

over again the frenzied parts of a madness that mocked the miseries of

the inmates of an asylum.

I must have exhausted myself by the excitement into which I was thrown;

for, some time afterwards, I found myself lying upon the cot, and

wakening again to a consciousness of all the ills that surrounded me.

The light of the moon had given place to the dull beams of earliest

dawn, which were only sufficient to shew me the extended figure on the

table, and the confusion into which the furniture of the cabin was

thrown. I heard the sounds of several footsteps in the cuddy. Sounds of

voices struck my ear; and, rising up, I crawled forward to a situation

where I could hear the communings from which my fate might be known.

'When the wind starts,' said Crawley--'it will be from the north--we

should turn and make all speed for Rio, where we may dispose of the

cargo, and then run the vessel to the West Indies. How do the men feel

disposed, Kreutz--all braced and steady?'

'All but Wingate and Ryder, who are watched by the others,' replied the

German. 'These dogs would mutiny, ha! ha!--mein gut friend Buist is

against their valking the plank; but they must either come in or go out.

Teufel! no mutineers aboard the Griffin.'

'Right, Hans,' said Crawley. 'Get Murdoch to knock together the

boards--we will bury him to-morrow; but the wife, man, what is to be

done with her?'

'Put her ashore, to be sure,' responded Kreutz. 'There is not von

difficulty there. The natives will be glad of her, and we want her not.

If this calm were gone, all would be gut and recht. That is the von

thing only that troubles me.'

'If there is no wind,' said Crawley, 'to carry us out of the channel,

there is none to bring any one to us.'

At this moment, I thought they heard some movements, produced by a

nervous trembling that came over me, and forced me to hold by a chair.

Some whisperings followed. Kreutz went away, and Crawley entered. I had

just time to retreat to the other side of the body of my husband. His

manner was now that which was natural to him--harsh and repulsive. He

ordered me peremptorily to the lower cabin. I had no power to resist, or

even to speak; but I saw, in the order, the eternal separation of me and

George; and, rushing forward, I withdrew the covering from his face, to

take the last look--to imprint the last kiss on his cold lips. The act

operated like the stirrings of conscience on the cowardly man of blood.

His averted eye glanced for an instant on the body, and, seizing the

coverlet, he wrapped up the countenance, and, taking me by the arm,

hurried me down to the apartment set apart for passengers. This cabin

was darker than the captain's, from some of the windows having been

changed into dead lights; and I considered myself pent up in a dungeon.

Hitherto my feelings had been, in a great measure, the result of

existing moving circumstances; but now I was left to reflection, in so

far as that act of the mind could be concerned in the attempt to picture

the extremities of a fate that seemed as unavoidable as unparalleled.

The diseased visions that had distracted me before any real evil

occurred, were changed, from their dreamy, shadowy character, to

realities. The lengthened trains of images that were required to satisfy

the cravings of hypochondria, fled; and, in their place, there was one

general, overwhelming fear, that seemed to engross all my thinking

energies, and left no power to particularize the visions of danger that

awaited me among the savages. There was only one presiding, prevailing

idea that served as the rallying point of my terrors; and that was the

dead body of George, with the white sheet in which he was swathed, and

the peculiarly-formed oaken table on which he was placed, and at which

we used to dine upon all the dainties to be found on board an Indiaman.

It was the steadfastness of this idea that excluded the images of the

fearful deep recesses--the Bacchanalian orgies of the savages--their

anthropophagous rites, their midnight revels; but retained, as it were,

hanging round it, the fear they had engendered, as a more complex

feeling. After Crawley had left me, I had thrown myself down on a

couch--an act of which I retained no consciousness; for afterwards, when

daylight began to break in through the only window that was not closed

up, I started to my feet, and did not know, for some time, that I was

separated from the corpse; the vision of which had, during the interval,

been so vivid, that it combined the conditions of figure and locality as

perfectly as if the object had been before me.

On the deck I now heard the sound of several loud voices, and afterwards

a scuffle, accompanied with the tramping of feet. There was then silence

for a time; but my ears were stung, on a sudden, by a scream, succeeded

by a plash, as if some one had been precipitated into the sea. A

gurgling noise, as if the individual were drowning, followed; and the

suspicion rushed into my mind, that they had made an example (to terrify

the others) of one of the men who had rebelled against the authority of

the mutineers. A silence, as deep as that of death, succeeded, which

lasted about an hour, at the end of which period the sound of the saw

and hammer were distinctly heard. I recollected the orders of Crawley,

for Murdoch, the carpenter, to prepare George's coffin. The knocking

continued for a considerable time, and produced such an effect upon me

that the ideas, which had been, as it were, chained up by the freezing

influence of the prevailing vision of the extended and rolled-up body,

broke away and careered through my mind with the velocity,

unconnectedness, and intensity, that belong to certain states of excited

mania. Images of the past and the future were mixed up in confusion; and

every succeeding thought stung me with increased pain, till the idea of

suicide again suggested itself, bringing in its train that which

destroyed it--the terror of an avenging God, who will pass judgment on

the takers of their own lives. I started, and sought forgiveness; and,

for the first time under this agony, felt the soft action of the balm of

a confided trust in Him who has mercy in endless stores for the good,

but who poured his fury even upon the house of Israel, for the blood

they shed upon the land. But, must I confess it, the relief I felt from

this high source was immediately again lost in the cold shiverings of

instinctive fear, as I heard the knocking cease, knew the coffin was

finished, and perceived, from the sounds in the cabin off the cuddy,

that they were putting the body into the rudely constructed box, with a

view of burying him in the deep sea.

Some indescribable emotion, at this time, forced me towards the cabin

window, although the sight of the water was frightful to me. It was

still and calm as ever, and the light was already sufficient to enable

me to see far down in its green recesses. I could not take my eye from

it. There were numerous creatures swimming about in it, some of which I

had got described to me, but many of them I had never seen before. They

seemed more hideous to me now than they had ever appeared when, on

former occasions, I sat and watched their motions. The large

bull-mouthed shark was there, rolling his huge body in apparent

lethargy, and turning up his white belly in grim playfulness, as if in

mockery of my misery. It had a charm about its truculent savageness that

riveted my attention, while it shook my frame. It was connected in my

mind with the fate of George's body, which, every moment, I expected to

hear plash in the sea, in the midst of that shoal of creatures with

strange forms and ravenous maws. An exacerbation of these sickly

feelings made me lift my eyes; but it was only to fix them on the not

less fearful island that lay before in the far distance, and now, in the

fogs of the morning, through which the red sun struggled to send his

beams, appeared a huge mass of inspissated vapour lying motionless on

the surface of the sea. The very indistinctness of this hazy vision

stimulated my fancy to its former morbid activity, and I saw again the

mystic wooded ravines, sacred to the rights of cannibalism, of which I

myself was doomed to be the object.

From this dream I was roused by the loud tread of men's feet over my

head, as if the individuals were bearing a load that increased the

heaviness of their steps. I was at no loss for the cause--they were

carrying the coffin with the body in it to midship, where it was to be

let down into its watery grave. In a short time afterwards, a gurgling

of the waters met my ear, and, struggling to the foot of the companion

ladder, I would have rushed upon deck if my strength would have

permitted; but I fell upon the steps, and, lying there, heard a cry from

some of them. I gathered, from the detached words I heard, that the

bottom of the coffin had given way, from its insufficiency and the

weight that had been put in it to make it sink; and that the body had

gone down, while the chest swam on the surface. Several feet were now

heard rapidly in motion, and the voice of Kreutz, who was running aft,

fell on my ear.

'Teufel!' I heard him say, 'we shall have that grim corpse when the

gallenblase--ha!--ha!--the gall bladder has burst, rising like von geist

from the bottom of the deep sea, and staring at us. Hell take the

stumper, Murdoch!'

These words, uttered by the German, were followed by some expression

from Crawley, no part of which I could make out, except the oaths

directed against the carpenter. The sounds died away; but I heard enough

to satisfy me of the fact that George's body had been consigned to the

deep with only the shroud to defend it against the attacks of the

ravenous creatures I had been contemplating. My mind was again forced,

and with increased energy, into the train of gloomy meditations

suggested by what I had heard; and so vivid were the visions that obeyed

the excited powers of my imagination, that I forgot, as I lay brooding

over them on the sofa to which I had staggered, the danger that next

awaited myself. I could not now look at the sea, for I feared to meet

the fact which would add probation to my imaginations--that the animals

I had seen there had disappeared to crowd round the prey that had been

given to them. Yet the actual vision of that dear form, mutilated, torn,

and devoured, could not, I am satisfied, have produced more insufferable

agony, than accompanied and resulted from the diseased imaginings in

which my fancy was engaged. The process that I pictured going on in the

bottom of the sea, was coloured by hues so sickly, and attended by

circumstances so distorted and grim, that all natural appearances,

however harrowing, must have fallen short of the power they exercised

over me. The positions in which I imagined him to be placed, were varied

in a greater degree than ever I had seen the human body; the expressions

of the countenance, though fixed by death, and not likely to be changed,

became as Protean as the changing postures of the limbs; and the marine

monsters that gambolled or fought around him for the prize, were

invested with forms, colours, and attributes, of a kind not limited to

what I had ever seen in the deep. The only idea that seemed to remain

stationary, and not liable to the mutations into which all the others

were every moment gliding, was the colour of the body, which was that of

the green medium in which he lay. That sickly hue pervaded all parts;

and even the dark or light colours of the inhabitants of the deep,

partook, more or less, of the prevailing tint. It seemed to be the

universal of all particulars, as time or space is the medium or

condition of existence of all thought and matter; I felt the

impossibility of any idea being true that did not partake of it; and, so

strongly was the feeling of the ex-natural that accompanied it, that

even now I cannot look at anything green without shuddering.

I cannot tell how long I was under the dominion of this train of

thought. I was, in a manner, torn from it by the entrance of Kreutz with

some food for me. He growled out a few words of mixed German and

English, and left it on the table. It is needless to say that I could

eat nothing. Even before these misfortunes overtook me, my appetite had

left me; but now I loathed all edibles. After having been roused from

the train of morbid imaginings in which I had been engaged, and which I

clung to as if they imparted to me some unnatural satisfaction, I felt

(and it is a curious fact) a recoiling disinclination to resume the grim

subject, and even resorted to some imbecile and despairing efforts to

avoid it. It was not that I expected any relief from forbearing: every

other subject that could be suggested by my position was equally fraught

with tears and pains; but that having, as I now suppose, exhausted, for

the time, the diseased workings, the view of an effort to call up again

the thoughts that had been as it were supplied by disease, penetrated me

with a sensation beyond the powers of endurance. For two or three hours

afterwards, my attention was directed to the proceedings upon deck; but

I could hear little beyond indistinct mutterings, and occasional sounds

of the treading of feet over me. The calm, which had lasted for many

days, still continued; and, until a wind sprung up, no effort could be

made by the mutineers to retrace their progress through the channel, and

proceed to their projected destination. At last the shades of night

began to fall; exhausted nature claimed some relief from her sufferings;

but the drowsiness that overcame me, was only a medium of a new series

of imaginings still more grotesque and unnatural than those that had

haunted me during the day.

When the morning dawned, I expected every moment the execution of the

purpose I had heard declared by Crawley, to put me ashore on the island;

and, during moments of more rational reflection, I could not account for

my not having been disposed of in this way on the previous day. The

terrors of that destiny were as strong upon me as ever; but, I must

confess, that the view of real evil, almost unprecedented, as it seemed,

in its extent and peculiarity, produced feelings entirely different from

what resulted from the prior musings of my hypochondriac fancy: I would

not be believed were I to say that the expected reality was not much

more painful than the sickly vision. The miseries were of different

kinds, proceeding from different causes, operating upon a mind in two

different states. There was something in my own power. I was not

justified in committing suicide as a mode of escape from an affliction

that God might have seen meet to put upon me; but all my reasonings on

this subject fled before the view of this next calamity that awaited me.

An extraordinary thought seized me, that I was not bound to hold life,

when, through my own body and sensibilities, God's laws were to be

overturned, and my sufferings were to be made a shame in the face of

heaven. I secreted a knife in my bosom, and sat in silent expectation of

the issue. I was again supplied with meat; but, on this occasion,

Crawley brought it to me--and here began a new evil. He resumed,

partially, his former dastardly sneaking manner; made love to me;

offered me the honour of being still a captain's wife, and accompanied

the offer with, obliquely-hinted threats of a due consequence of my

rejection of his suit. I spurned him; but I cannot dwell on the details

of this proceeding. His suit was persisted in for two or three days,

when, roused to madness, he told me, that next day, if I consented not,

I would be wedded to the natives of Madagascar. I traced the outline of

the knife through the covering of my bosom, and defied him.

The next night was clear, and somewhat chill--indications of a cessation

of the calm. The rudeness of Crawley had had the effect of keeping my

mind from falling into the grasp of the demon of diseased fantasy; but,

now my fate was fixed, I had no more to fear from him; and towards

midnight, I fell again into the train of imaginings that had formerly

haunted me. I had opened the cabin window for air--having felt a

suffocating oppression of the chest during the day, proceeding from the

extreme heat and the confined apartment. My eyes were again fixed in the

direction of the island. I could see the dark shade of the land lying

upon the gilded waters. All was still; my thoughts sought again the

deep--the grave of George, the fancied condition of his body; and, as my

ideas diverged to the calm scene around, it appeared to me as if all

nature were dead, and that my own pulsations were the only living

movements on earth. Lights now began to move along the shore, and then a

fire blazed up into the firmament. The bodies of the savages flitted

before it; I had seen the same appearances before; but I was now

connected with these orgies in a more _real_ manner than formerly. They

ceased, and my mind again sought the recesses of the green deep, where

all I loved on earth lay engulfed. My eye at times wandered over the

surface of the waters; but I feared to look downwards into their bosom.

My attention was suddenly fixed by an object in the sea. I put up my

hands and rubbed my eyes. Was I deceived by a fancy? No! a dead body was

there, not four yards distant from where I sat. It was that of my

husband, rolled up in the same white sheet in which I had seen him

extended on the oak table, and with his head raised somewhat above the

surface, by the weights placed in the shroud having, as I afterwards

thought, descended to the feet. A part of the sewing had been torn off

the head, which was bare--the face was openly exposed to me, the moon

shone upon it; I could perceive the very features, and even the

lustreless eyes, that seemed fixed on the ship. There was not a breath

of wind to ruffle the surface of the sea, which shone with a blue lustre

in the light of the moon; and the body was as motionless as if it had

been fixed on the earth. I have described, hitherto, what actually

befell me, with the various states of my mind under extraordinary

circumstances of pain and depression. My fancies belonged as much to

nature as the facts which excited and nourished them, and must be

believed by those who have studied the workings of the mind, even

unconnected with the principles and facts of pathology. This was,

however, no vision of the fancy, but a reality resulting from well-known

physical laws. I sat, fixed immovably, at the window, and felt no more

power of receding from it, than I formerly had of resigning my musings.

My eyes were fixed upon that countenance which had been the _beau ideal_

of love's idolatry--the fairest thing on earth, and the archetype of my

dreams of heaven. I could not fly from it, horrible as it seemed in its

blue glare and ghastly expression. I loved it while it shocked me; and

all my powers of thinking were bound up in freezing terror. I felt the

hair on my head move as the shrivelling skin became corrugated over my

temples. That, and the occasional throbbings of my heart, were the only

motions of any part of my being; but the body I gazed at seemed to be as

immovable, and its eyes seemed not less steadfastly fixed on me than

mine were on it.

How long I sat in this position I know not. There was no internal

impulse that moved me to desist. I could, I thought, have looked for

ever. Certain fearful objects possess a charm over the mind--and this

was one of them; but I have sometimes thought that the power lay in

producing the negative state of mental paralysis; for the instant my

attention was called to a strange noise upon the deck, I was suddenly

recalled to a natural sense of the fear it inspired. The sounds I heard

were a mixture of exclamations and objections, pronounced in tones of

fear and anger. I turned away my face from the dead body, with a strong

feeling of repugnance to contemplate it again; and, groping my way to

the companion-ladder, listened to what was going on above. Kreutz and

Crawley were in communication.

'There is more than chance in that frightful appearance,' I heard

Crawley say. 'And this calm too--it will never end. God have mercy on

us! Is there no man that will undertake to sink the body? I cannot stand

the gaze of these white balls. See! the face is directed towards me; and

yet I did not do the deed, though I authorized it. Will no one save me

from the glare of the grim avenger? I will give twenty gold pieces to

the man who will remove it to the deep. Go forward, Kreutz, and try if

you can prevail upon a bold heart to undertake the task!'

'Pho, man!' responded the German--'all von phantasy--anybody would have

risen in the same way--Teufel! I heed it not von peterpfenning. But the

men are alarmed, and begin to say that the captain has not got fair

play. Hush! seize your degen. There is von commotion before the mast.'

I now heard a tumult in the fore part of the vessel and began to

suspect that the crew had been led to believe that George had died a

natural death, and had been by some means prevailed upon to work the

vessel, when the wind rose in another direction, under the command of

Crawley. The noise increased, and with it the fears of the cowardly

villain whose conscience had been awakened by such strange means. Kreutz

had left him to try to pacify the men; and the tones of his

terror-struck voice continued to murmur around.

'There it still is,' he groaned, as his attention seemed to be divided

between the sight he contemplated and the tumult, 'gazing steadfastly

with these lack-lustre eyes for revenge. It is on me they are

fixed--immovably fixed--as a victim which the spirit that floats over

the body in that dead light of the moon demands, and will get. There is

a God above in that blue firmament, who sees all things. I am lost.

These men obey the call of a power that chooses that grim apparition as

its instrument to call down destruction on my head. Ha! Kreutz has no

influence here; the avengers are prepared.'

A step now came rapidly forward, and Kreutz's voice was again heard.

'If you will not try to quell them,' said he, 'all is lost. They swear

the captain has been murdered, and that verdamt traitor Buist heads them

on. Donner! shall Hans Kreutz die like one muzzled dog? On with degen in

hand, and it may not be too late! We have friends among the caitiffs;

strike down the first man; his blut will terrify them more than that

staring geist, which is, after all, only von natural body, with no more

spirit in it than the bones of my grandmutter. Frisch! frisch! auf, man!

come, come, dash in and strike the first mutineer!'

The cowardly spirit of Crawley was acted upon by the stern German; for I

heard him cry out--

'Hold there, men! what means this tumult--'sdeath?'

The rest of his words were drowned by the noise; but I heard the sounds

of his and Kreutz's feet as they rushed forward. In an instant, the

sound like that of a man falling prostrate on the deck, met my ear; and

then there rose a yell that rung through every cranny of the ship. All

seemed engaged in a desperate struggle. The words 'Revenge for our

captain!' often rose high above all the other sounds. The clanging of

many daggers followed; several bodies fell with a crash upon the deck,

and loud groans, as if from persons in the agonies of death, were mixed

with the cries of those who were struggling for victory. The tramping

and confusion increased, till all distinct sound seemed lost in a

general uproar. I got alarmed, and left my station at the foot of the

companion-ladder; but I knew not whither to fly. I took again my seat at

the window, as if I felt that there was an opening for me from which I

might fly from the fearful scene. My agitation had banished from my mind

for an instant the vision of the body; and I started again with

increased fear as my eyes fell upon the corpse that had apparently been

the cause of the uproar. It was still there, as motionless as before;

yet, I thought, still nearer to me. I saw the features still more

distinctly than ever, and found my mind again chained down by the charm

it threw over me. The sounds for a time seemed to come upon my ear from

a far, far distance, or like those heard in a dream; and like a dreamer,

too, I struggled to get away from a vision that I at once loved and

trembled at. The noises on deck seemed as those of the world, and the

object before me the creation of the fancy that bound my soul, but left

the sense of hearing open to living sounds. While in this state, I was

suddenly roused by a rush of several men into the cabin; they held

daggers in their hands and their countenances were besmeared with blood.

I looked at them, under the impression that they were my enemies, and

that the cause of Crawley had triumphed; but I was soon undeceived--they

told me that both he and Kreutz lay dead upon the deck, and that the

victorious party were determined to complete the voyage and take the

ship to Madras. The removal of one evil from a mind borne down by the

weight of many, only leaves a greater power of susceptibility of the

pain of what remains. The moment I heard of my own personal safety, I

recurred again to the subject that affected me more deeply than even the

fears of being consigned to the natives of the island--the dead body of

George was still in the waters. The men understood and appreciated my

sufferings. I again went to the cabin window, and, pointing to the

corpse, implored Buist, who was present, to get it taken up and buried.

He replied, that that had already been agreed upon, and orders were

given to that effect. Several of the men volunteered of themselves to

assist. A boat was put out, and I watched the solemn process. I saw them

drag up the body from the sea, and would have flown to the deck to

embrace once more the dearest object of my earthly affections; but I was

restrained from motives of humanity. I had reason to suppose that it had

been dreadfully mutilated, and that was the reason why I was saved the

pain of the sad sight. That same evening it was consigned again to the

deep; and with it sunk the bodies of his murderers, Crawley and Kreutz.

Next day, a breeze sprang up, and bore us away from that fatal place. My

eyes were fixed on it till I could see no longer any traces of that

island which had caused me so many fears. In a short time, we arrived in

India, where I remained about two months, and returned again with the

Griffin to Britain.

"Now, sir," she continued, "all these things are in the course of man's

doings in this strange world. It is also very natural that I should

think of him. But a more dreadful effect has followed. I shudder when I

think of it."

She stopped and looked at me, as if she were afraid to touch upon the

subject of the visual illusion. I told her that I understood the cause

of her fears; and having questioned her, I satisfied myself from her

answers that I had at last discovered a case of true _monomania_, in

which the patient conceived that she saw, with the same distinctness as

when she looked from the cabin window of the _Griffin_ the corpse of her

husband swimming in the sea, with the head and chest above the waters,

surrounded with the same blue moonlight, and every minute circumstance

attending the real presence.

I meditated a cure; but I frankly confess that it was my anxious wish to

witness her under the influence of the fit; and, with that view, I

purposed waiting upon her repeatedly in the evenings, when, under the

shaded light of the candle, it generally came over her. I was baffled in

this for several weeks, chiefly, I presume, from the circumstance of my

presence operating as an engagement of her mind; but one evening when I

was sitting with her mother in another room, the sister came suddenly,

and beckoned me into that occupied by my patient. The door was opened

quietly and, on looking in, I saw, for the first time, a vision-struck

victim of this extraordinary disease. She sat as if under a spell, her

arms extended, her eyes fixed on the imaginary object, and every sense

bound up in that which contemplated the spectre vision. The fit

ended with a loud scream; she fell back in her chair, crying

wildly--"George!--George!" and lay, for a minute or two, apparently

insensible.

I continued my study of this extraordinary case for a considerable

period; and, while I administered to her relief, I got her to explain to

me some things which may be of use to our profession. I need not say

that I was able to penetrate the dark secret of the seat of either the

pathology or the metaphysique of the disease. That it was connected with

the irritability of her nerves, and the affection of the eyes, there can

be little doubt; because, as she mended in health, the fits diminished

in number, and latterly went off. I may, however, state that, from all I

could learn from her, the fit was something of the nature of a

dream--all the objects around her, at the time, being as much unnoticed

as if they existed not; and although she was possessed with an absolute

conviction that the body of her husband was actually at the time

present, it was precisely that kind of conviction that we feel in a

vivid dream.

[Footnote 2: HIBBERT'S _Philosophy of Apparitions_; BREWSTER'S _Letters on

Natural Magic_; SCOTT'S _Letters on Witchcraft_, _&c._]

THE FOUNDLING AT SEA.

About the year 1708 or 1710, the good ship _Isabella_, Captain Hardy,

sailed from the port of Greenock for Bombay, being chartered by the East

India Company to carry out a quantity of arms and ammunition for the use

of the Company's forces.

The _Isabella_ carried out with her several passengers; amongst whom

were a lady, her child--a girl about three years of age--and a

servant-maid. This lady, whose name was Elderslie, was the wife of a

lieutenant in the British army, who was then with his regiment at

Calcutta, whither she was about to follow him; he having written home

that, as he had been fortunate enough to obtain some semi-civil

appointments in addition to his military services, he would, in all

probability, be a residenter there for many years. The lieutenant added

that, under these circumstances, he wished his "dear Betsy, and their

darling little Julia, to join him as soon as possible." And this, he

said, he had the less hesitation in requiring, that the appointments he

alluded to would render their situation easy and comfortable. It was

then in obedience to this invitation that Mrs Elderslie and her child

were now passengers on board the _Isabella_.

For about six weeks the gallant ship pursued her way prosperously--that

whole period being marked only by alternatives of temporary calms and

fair winds. The vessel was now off the coast of Guinea; and here an

inscrutable Providence had decreed that her ill-fated voyage--for it was

destined to be so, flattering as had been its outset--should terminate.

A storm arose--a dreadful storm--one of those wild bursts of elemental

fury which mock the might of man, and hoarsely laugh at his puny and

feeble efforts to resist their destructive powers. For two days and

nights the vessel, stript of every inch of canvass, drove wildly before

the wind; and, on the morning of the third day, struck furiously on a

reef of rocks, at about half a mile's distance from the shore. On the

ship striking, the crew--not doubting that she would immediately go to

pieces, for a dreadful sea was beating over her, and she was, besides,

every now and then, surging heavily against the rock on which she now

lay--instantly took to their boats, accompanied by the passengers. All

the passengers? No, not all. There was one amissing. It was Mrs

Elderslie. About ten minutes before the ship struck, that unfortunate

lady, together with two men and a boy, were swept from the deck by a

huge sea that broke over the stern; sending, with irresistible fury, a

rushing deluge of water, of many feet in depth, over the entire length

of the ship. Neither Mrs Elderslie nor any of the unhappy participators

in her dismal fate were seen again.

In the hurry and confusion of taking to the boats, none recollected that

there was still a child on board--the child of the unfortunate lady who

had just perished; or, if any did recollect this, none chose to run the

risk of missing the opportunity of escape presented by the boats, by

going in search of the hapless child, who was at that moment below in

the cabin. In the meantime, the overloaded boats--for they were much too

small to carry the numbers who were now crowded into them, especially in

such a sea as was then raging--had pushed off, and were labouring to

gain the shore. It was a destination they were doomed never to reach.

Before they had got half-way, both boats were swamped--the one

immediately after the other--and all on board perished, after a brief

struggle with the roaring and tumbling waves that were bellowing around

them.

From this moment, the storm, as if now satisfied with the mischief it

had wrought, began to abate. In half an hour it had altogether subsided;

and the waves, though still rolling heavily, had lost the violence and

energy of their former motion. They seemed worn out and exhausted by

their late fury.

The crew of the unfortunate vessel had left her, as we have said, in the

expectation that she would shortly go to pieces; but it would have been

better for them had they had more confidence in her strength, and

remained by her; for, strange to tell, she withstood the fury of the

elements, and, though sorely battered and shaken, her dark hull still

rested securely on the rock on which she had struck. The wreck of the

_Isabella_ had been witnessed from the shore by a crowd of the natives,

who had assembled directly opposite the fatal reef on which she had

struck. They would fain have gone out in their canoes to the unfortunate

vessel when she first struck, as was made evident by some unsuccessful

attempts they made to paddle towards her; but whether with a friendly or

hostile purpose, cannot be known. On the storm subsiding, however, they

renewed their attempts. A score of canoes started for the wreck, reached

it, and, in an instant after, the deck of the unfortunate vessel was

covered with wild Indians. Whooping and yelling in the savage excitement

occasioned by the novelty of everything around, they flew madly about

the deck, scrambled down into the hold, tore open bales and packages,

and possessed themselves of whatever most attracted their whimsical and

capricious fancies. While some were thus occupied in the hold, others

were ransacking the cabin. It was here, and at this moment, that a scene

of extraordinary interest took place. A huge savage, who was peering

curiously into one of the cabin beds, suddenly uttered a yell, so

piercing and unusual, that it attracted the notice of all his wild

companions; then, plunging his hand into the bed, drew forth, and held

up to the wondering gaze of the latter, a beautiful little girl of about

three years old. It was the daughter of the unfortunate Mrs Elderslie.

The unconscious child had slept during the whole of the catastrophe,

which had deprived her, first of her parent, and subsequently of her

protectors, and had only awoke with the shout of the savage who now held

her in his powerful, but not unfriendly grasp; for he seemed delighted

with his prize. He hugged the infant in his bosom, looked at it, laughed

over it, and performed a thousand antics expressive of his admiration

and affection for the fair and blooming child of which he had thus

strangely become possessed. The child, for some time, expressed great

terror of her new protector and his sable companions, calling loudly on

her mother; but the anxious and eager endearments of the former

gradually calmed her fears and quieted her cries.

In the meantime, the plunder of the vessel was going on vigorously in

all directions--above and below, in the cabin and forecastle, till, at

length, as much was collected as the savages thought their canoes would

safely carry. These, therefore, were now loaded with the booty; and the

whole fleet, shortly after, made for the shore.

In one of these canoes was little Julia Elderslie and her new protector,

who, by still maintaining his friendly charge over her, shewed that he

meant to appropriate her as a part of his share of the plunder.

On reaching the shore, the kind-hearted savage, as his whole conduct in

the affair shewed him to be, consigned his little protegee to the care

of a female--one of the group of women who were on the beach awaiting

the arrival of the canoes, and who appeared to be his wife.

The woman received the child with similar expressions of surprise and

delight with those which had marked her husband's conduct on his first

finding her. She turned her gently round and round, examined her with a

delighted curiosity, patted her cheeks, felt her legs and arms, and, in

short, handled her as if she had been some strange toy, or as if she

wished to be assured that she was really a thing of flesh and blood.

For two days the natives continued their plunder of the wreck. By the

third, the vessel had been cleared of every article of any value that

could be carried away; and on this being ascertained, a general division

of the spoil, accumulated on the shore, took place.

It was a scene of dreadful confusion and uproar, and more than once

threatened to terminate in bloodshed; but it eventually closed without

any such catastrophe. The partition was effected, the encampment was

broken up, and the whole band--men, women, and children, all loaded with

plunder--commenced their march into the interior; the little Julia

forming part of the burden of the man who had first appropriated her; a

labour in which he was from time to time relieved by his wife.

From three to four years after the occurrence of the events just

related, a Scotch merchant ship, the _Dolphin_ of Ayr, Captain

Clydesdale, bound for the Cape of Good Hope, while prosecuting her

voyage, unexpectedly run short of water, in consequence of the bursting

of a tank, when off the Gold Coast of Africa.

On being informed of the accident, the captain determined on running for

the land for the purpose of endeavouring to procure a further supply of

the indispensable necessary of which he had just sustained so serious a

loss.

The vessel was, accordingly, directed towards the coast, which she

neared in a few hours; and, finally, entered a small bay, which seemed

likely to afford at once the article wanted, and a safe anchorage for

the ship while she waited for its reception.

By a curious chance, the bay which the _Dolphin_ now entered was the

same in which the _Isabella_ had been wrecked upwards of three years

before. But of that ill-fated vessel there was now no trace; a

succession of storms, similar to that which had first hurled her on the

rocks, had at length accomplished her entire destruction: she had, in

time, been beaten to pieces, and had now wholly disappeared.

There was then no appearance of any kind, no memorial nor vestige by

which those on board the _Dolphin_ might learn, or at all suspect that

the locality they were now in had been the scene of so deep a tragedy as

that recorded in the early part of our tale.

All unconscious of this, the _Dolphin_ came to within pistol-shot not

only of the reef, but of the identical spot on which the _Isabella_ had

been wrecked.

Having come to anchor, a boat, filled with empty watercasks, was

despatched from the ship for the shore. In this boat was the captain,

first mate, and a pretty numerous party of men, all well armed, in case

of any interruption from the natives.

On landing, Captain Clydesdale, the mate, and two men, leaving the

others in the boat, set out in quest of water. The search was not a

tedious one. When they had walked about a quarter of a mile inland, the

gratifying noise of a waterfall struck upon their ears. Following the

delightful sound, they quickly reached a rocky dell into which a crystal

sheet of water, of considerable breadth, was falling from a height of

about fifteen feet; and, after sportively circling about for a moment in

a deep but clear pool below, sought the channel which conducted to the

sea, found it, and glided noiselessly away.

Delighted with this opportune discovery, Captain Clydesdale despatched

one of the men who was along with him to the boat, to order the others

up with the water casks.

Having seen the people commence the task of filling the latter, the

captain and mate, each armed with a musket, cutlass, and brace of

pistols, started for a walk a little farther inland, in order to obtain

a view of the country. For nearly an hour they wandered on, now scaling

heights, and now forcing their way through patches of tangled brushwood,

without meeting with any adventure, or seeing anything at all

extraordinary. They had now gained the banks of the stream which, lower

down, formed the cascade at which the water casks were filling; and this

they proposed to trace downwards, as its banks presented a clear and

open route, till they should reach the point whence they had started.

While jogging leisurely along this route, the adventurers, by turning a

projecting rock, suddenly opened a small bight or hollow, sheltered on

all sides, except towards the river, by the high grounds around it. In

the centre of this little glen was an Indian encampment! Alarmed at this

unexpected sight, the captain and mate abruptly halted, and would have

again retreated behind the projecting rock or knoll which had first

concealed them, and taken another route, but they perceived they were

seen by a group of male natives who were lolling on the grass in front

of the wigwams. On seeing the white men--who now stood fast, aware that

it was useless to attempt to retreat--the Indians sprang to their feet

with a loud yell, and rushed towards them. The captain and mate

instinctively brought down their muskets; for reason would have shown

them that resistance was equally useless with flight. The hostile

attitude, however, which they had assumed, had the effect of checking

the advance of the natives, who suddenly halted, and, to the great

relief of the captain and mate, made friendly signs of welcome to them.

Confiding in and returning these signs, the latter raised their muskets

and advanced towards the party, who now also resumed their march towards

the strangers. They met, when, after some attempts at conversation,

conducted on the part of the natives with great good-humour, but, on

both sides, altogether in vain, one of the former suddenly ran off at

full speed towards the wigwams, into one of which he plunged, and

instantly reappeared, leading a female child of six or seven years of

age by the hand. As he advanced towards the captain and mate, he kept

pointing to the child's face, then to his own, then towards those of the

strangers, and laughing loudly the while.

With an amazement which they would have found it difficult to express,

Clydesdale and his companion perceived that the child, now produced, was

fair, of regular features, smooth hair, and without any trace of African

origin. Exposure to a tropical sun had deeply embrowned her little

cheeks; but enough of bloom still remained, as, when coupled with other

characteristics, left no doubt on the minds of the captain and his mate

that the child, however it had come into its present situation, was of

European parentage.

His curiosity greatly excited by this extraordinary circumstance, Mr

Clydesdale now endeavoured to obtain some account of the child from the

natives; but he could make little or nothing of the attempted conference

on this subject. From what, however, he did gather, he came to the

conclusion--a very accurate one, as the reader may guess--that a

shipwreck had taken place on the coast, and that the child had been

saved by the natives.

Believing this to be the case, Captain Clydesdale now became anxious to

know whether any others had escaped; but could not make himself

understood. At length one of the savages, of more apt comprehension than

the others, seemed to have obtained a glimmering of the import of the

captain's queries, and fell upon an ingenious mode of replying to them.

Grasping Mr Clydesdale by the arm, he conducted him to a small pool of

water that was hard by. He then took a piece of bark that was lying on

the ground, placed about a dozen small pebbles on it, and launched it

into the pool. Then stooping down, he edged it over, till the stones

slid, one after the other, into the water, until one only remained.

Allowing the piece of bark now to right itself, and to float on the

water, he pointed to the single stone it carried, and then to the child;

thus intimating, as Mr Clydesdale understood it, and as it was evidently

meant to signify, that all had perished excepting the little girl.

While this primitive mode of communication was going on, the man who had

brought the child to Captain Clydesdale had returned to his wigwam, and

now reappeared, carrying several articles in his hand, which he held up

to the former. Mr Clydesdale took them in his hand, and found them to

consist of fragments of a child's dress, made, as he thought, after the

fashion of those in use in Scotland. On the corner of what appeared to

be the remains of a little shift, he discovered the initials, J. E. But

the most interesting relic produced on this occasion, was a small

locket, containing some rich black hair on one side, and on the other

the miniature of a young man in a military uniform, with the same

initials, J. E., engraven on the rim. This locket, the man who brought

it gave Captain Clydesdale to understand, had been found hanging around

the neck of the child when first discovered.

Satisfied now, beyond all doubt, of the child's European descent, Mr

Clydesdale approached her, took her kindly by the hand, and, hoping to

make something of her own testimony, began to put some questions to her;

but, to his great disappointment, found that she did not understand him,

although he spoke to her both in French and English. The little girl, in

truth, he soon discovered, neither understood nor spoke any language but

that of the tribe in whose hands she was.

It appeared, however, sufficiently clear to Captain Clydesdale, that a

shipwreck had taken place on the coast, and that at no very great

distance of time, and that the child before him had been on board of the

unfortunate vessel. Various circumstances, too, led him to the belief

that the ship had been a British one; and in this opinion he was joined

by the mate.

The result of the Captain's reflections on these points, was a

determination to take the child to Scotland with him, if he could

prevail upon her present possessors to part with her, and to take his

chance of making some discovery regarding her on his return home.

Having come to this resolution, he hastened to make known to the natives

his wish to have the little girl; and was well pleased to perceive that

the proposal, which they seemed at once to comprehend, was not received

with any surprise, far less indignation. Encouraged by this reception of

his overture, Captain Clydesdale now addressed himself particularly to

the man who appeared to be the guardian, or, perhaps, proprietor of the

child, and, unbuckling his cutlass from his side, presented it to

him--making him, at the same time, to understand that he offered it as

the price of the little girl. The man demurred. Captain Clydesdale

pulled a clasp-knife out of his pocket, and made signs that he would

give that also, provided the locket and fragment of shift, with the

initials on it, were given along with the child. This addition to the

first offer had the desired effect. The cutlass and knife were accepted,

the locket and shift given in exchange, and the little hand of the girl

placed in Captain Clydesdale's, to signify that she was now his

property. After some farther interchange of civilities with the natives,

the captain, his mate, and the little Julia Elderslie--for, we presume,

the reader has been all along perfectly aware that the child in question

was no other than that unfortunate little personage--proceeded on their

way towards the place where the watering party had been left. This spot

they reached in safety, after about an hour's walking, and found the men

waiting their return--the casks having been already all filled and

shipped.

In half an hour after, the boat was alongside the _Dolphin_, and little

Julia was handed upon deck; and, in less than another hour, the ship was

under weigh, and prosecuting her voyage to the Cape, where she

ultimately arrived in safety. During this time, Captain Clydesdale had

discovered in his Ponakonta--the name given to little Julia by the

Africans, and by which he delighted to call her--a disposition so docile

and affectionate, and a manner so gentle and unobtrusive, that he

already loved her with all the tenderness of a parent, and had secretly

resolved that he would adopt her as his own, and as such bring her up

and educate her, if no one possessed of a better right to discharge this

duty to her should ever appear.

In about six months after the occurrence of the events just related, the

good ship _Dolphin_ arrived safely at the harbour of Ayr, all well; and

the little demi-savage, Ponakonta, in high spirits, and already

beginning to jabber very passable English--an acquisition which still

more endeared her to her kind-hearted protector, who took great delight

in listening to her prattle, and in questioning her regarding her life

amongst the Africans--of which she was now able to give a tolerably

intelligible account. She had, however, no recollection whatever of the

shipwreck, nor of any incident connected with it. Some dreamy

reminiscences, indeed, she had of her mother; but, as might have been

expected, considering how very young she was when that catastrophe

happened which had deprived her of her parent, they were too vague and

indefinite to be of the slightest avail towards throwing any light on

her parentage.

On arriving at Ayr, Captain Clydesdale's first step, with regard to his

little charge, was to avail himself of every means he could think of to

make her singular history, with all its particulars, publicly known, in

the hope that it might bring some one forward who stood in some

relationship to her. The worthy man, however, took this step merely as

one that was right and proper in the case, and not, by any means, from

any desire to get rid of his little protegee. On the contrary, if truth

be told, he would have been sadly disappointed had any one appeared to

claim her. Nothing of this kind occurring, after a lapse of several

weeks, Captain Clydesdale--who, although pretty far advanced in years,

was unmarried, and had no domestic establishment of his own, being

almost constantly at sea--placed little Julia under the charge of some

female relatives, with instructions to give her every sort of education

befitting her years; for all of which--boarding, clothing, and

tuition--he came under an obligation to pay quarterly--giving a handsome

sum, in the meantime, to account. Having thus disposed of his protegee,

and satisfied that he had placed her in good hands, which was indeed the

case, Captain Clydesdale went again to sea--his destination, on this

occasion, being South America.

The worthy man, however, did not go away before having a parting

interview with his little Ponakonta, whom he kissed a thousand times,

nor before he had entreated for her every kindness and attention, during

his absence, at the hands of those whom he had now constituted her

guardians. It was upwards of two years before Captain Clydesdale

returned from this voyage; for it included several trading trips between

foreign ports; and thus was his absence prolonged.

Great was the good man's delight with the improvement which he found had

taken place on his little charge since his departure. She now spoke

English fluently; had made rapid progress in her education; and gave

promise of being more than ordinarily beautiful. Captain Clydesdale had

the farther satisfaction of learning that she was a universal

favourite--her gentle manners and affectionate disposition having

endeared her to all.

On first casting eyes on her protector, after his return from South

America, little Julia at once recognised him, flew towards him, flung

her arms about his neck, and wept for joy--calling him, in muttered

sounds, her father, her dear father. Deeply affected by the warmth of

the grateful child's regard, Captain Clydesdale, with streaming eyes,

took her up in his arms, hugged her to his bosom, and kissed her with

all the fervour of parental love. Soon after, Captain Clydesdale again

went to sea; and, by and by, again returned. Voyage after voyage

followed, of various lengths; and, after the termination of each, the

worthy man found his interesting protegee still advancing in the way of

improvement, and still strengthening her hold on the affections of those

around her.

Time thus passed on, until a period of nine years had slipped away; and

when it had, Julia Elderslie--who now bore, and had all along, since her

arrival in Scotland, borne, the name of Maria Clydesdale--was a blooming

and highly accomplished girl of sixteen.

It was about this period that Captain Clydesdale began to think of

retiring from the sea, and of settling at home for the remainder of his

life. He was now upwards of sixty years of age, and found himself fast

getting incompetent to the arduous duties of his profession.

Fortunately, he was in a condition, as regarded circumstances, to enable

him to effect the retirement he meditated. He was by no means rich; but,

having never married, he had accumulated sufficient to live upon, for

the few remaining years that might be vouchsafed him.