"My brethren!" he
exclaimed, and smiting his hand upon his forehead, cried, "Speak,
mother!--speak now!" and fell with his face upon the floor. The children
rushed screaming from the school, and when the villagers entered, the
troubled spirit had fled for ever.
THE LAWYER'S TALES.
THE STORY OF MYSIE CRAIG.
In detailing the curious circumstances of the following story, I am
again only reporting a real law case to be found in the Court of Session
Records, the turning-point of which was as invisible to the judges as to
the parties themselves--that is, until the end came; a circumstance
again which made the case a kind of developed romance. But as an end
implies a beginning, and the one is certainly as necessary as the other,
we request you to accompany us--taking care of your feet--up the narrow
spiral staircase of a tenement called Corbet's Land, in the same old
town where so many wonderful things in the complicated drama--or dream,
if you are a Marphurius--of human life have occurred. Up which spiral
stair having got by the help of our hands, almost as indispensable as
that of the feet, we find ourselves in a little human dovecot of two
small rooms, occupied by two persons not unlike, in many respects, two
doves--Widow Craig and her daughter, called May, euphuized by the Scotch
into Mysie.
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