of the landlady of the inn as his mother, and was anxious to know wheth er she knew of what had befallen him. Indeed, it was another most marked and peculiar fact to add to the list of phenomena in connexion with nervous physiology. For my part, I resolved to experiment upon him so as to satisfy my mind upon several points about which doubts are generally entertained, such as the following:

It is a belief of some, especially those who deny the separate existence of mind, that in deep sleep, in compression of the brain and some other states, thought is entirely absent; in fact, that the mind is annihilated. Others hold that that mental chain philosophers call the association of ideas-that series in which thoughts cause and are followed by other thoughts in continual succession, never intermits in any circumstances— commencing with birth, flowing on link after link, through sleep and waking, health and disease, and broken only by death, or the separation of the mind, in which it takes place from the body; no! not broken, but carried on into another state of existence. My experience with him leant in favor of the latter hypothesis. I asked him if during the night he had dreamt much.

"Have you no recollection of any dream the whole night through ?" "Yes, there is in my mind a faint recollection of some very sweet, simple and plaintive music, not like that of any instrument I know, but very beautiful."

Before this the other gentlemen, who had large practices, and whose time was very valuable, had withdrawn. I now sought the lady of the house. She darted at me, as I entered the drawing-room, a look of intense anxiety; but, resuming her cold and resolute aspect

"Have you been successful, doctor?" said she.

"Successful, madam, beyond our warmest wishes." "Is he sensible ?"

"He is."

"Does he recollect anything?"

"The period since the injury appears to him has passed but as a night's sleep, but he recollects perfectly the events that occurred close before receiving the injury, and mentions them as having happened yesterday.” Mentions, doctor! mentions what?"

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“Oh, nothing, as yet; only his being hurt.”

"Doctor, you are not deceiving me? You know there is no trust to be placed in the testimony of one who has been so long in such a state, and may have had dreadful dreams. Stay, I must go to him myself. No one shall see him till I have; he is my own son!" and she went hastily from the room.

In a minute she returned greatly excited, informing me, hurriedly, that immediately on seeing her he had become once more insensible, and was perfectly sure he had recognised her.

"Go to him, doctor," she continued, "I cannot: I foresaw this; I am lost!" On going to the room where he lay, I found he had fainted. By use of the proper means he shortly recovered, though I was apprehensive, at first, that he had relapsed into the cataleptic state.

"Oh, Doctor C," he cried, "that midwife has been here: let her be seized; she is guilty of murder! She poisoned my child last night; I mean Emily's infant. Don't doubt me, doctor; I saw her, and will swear to it. Let her be taken before she can escape from the house!"

I stood thunderstruck at this, remaining with my eyes fixed upon the patient, as, spent with the exertion of so much and such excited speaking, he appeared falling away into another fainting fit, and hardly able to help him for bewilderment. Was I to credit this, or was I not? I felt overpowered by the vortex of thoughts that was seething in my mind, of crimes hideous and unnatural-perjury, adultery, murder, and all within a fearfully close-girt chain of consanguinity. Never was my curiosity more strongly stimulated than at that moment. It might be called a morbid curiosity. I listened to him with most absorbing attention; I was not conscious of any external thing save his voice, and the animated play of his features, as with effort, and piece by piece he detailed to me the guilty secrets that had for so long been sepulchred in his torpid brain, and but for the power of my own noble profession, might never have been raised into the light of day.

He had all along, it appeared, ever since Emily deserted the bed of her husband, been in the habit of coming nightly to the chamber she had chosen for herself. The iron stanchions of the lower windows, the ivy that covered the walls of the old Grange, the fantastic brick cornicing, and a rain-pipe from the roof, formed altogether a convenient and easy ladder for an agile young man like him to climb withal into that apartment, at midnight, when there was none to watch but the eye of One, whose finger, may I be permitted to say, was so strangely manifest throughout this maze of evil, turning crime into the means of its own discovery and punishment. The night he first ventured upon such a visit after the birth of the child, he had climbed to the window-it was open, for it was then summer and very warm. Silently catching hold of the sill, he raised his head above it and looked into the room. The mother he saw in bed in a deep sleep, and the little white cap of the baby he could see peeping from her bosom. Divided from her by the curtains, but open to him as he looked in at the window, he beheld two women sit together whispering. A small table was beside them, with a dim rushlight twinkling upon it. One of them was the midwife; to his astonishment he recognized the other to be the black beggar. She held in one hand a small phial, and with the other was forcing upon the white woman's hand an ivory squirt, with a long, rounded beak. After much talking, the latter drew up the handle of the squirt, filling it with the liquor from the phial. She then crept stealthily to the bedside and uncovered the infant, but returned again.

"I cannot do it," she said: "anything but this. Alas! I have been a mother, and the innocent looks so like my own lost darling! I have a feeling, a something within me, as if my own blood flowed in the veins of that baby-I cannot do it."

They talked together awhile, during which the black woman appeared to be remonstrating with and encouraging her, and again she approached

the bed. She stooped over it a little, and returning to the negress said,— "It is done-Christ have mercy upon me!"

At that instant they caught sight of his face, as from the black midnight outside he looked in upon them through the window. They were startled. The Obi woman fled to the door; the midwife hesitated a moment, then going to the window loosened the hold of his fingers upon the sill, and he dropped a height of three stories among some loose stones and rubbish below; and thus, and not from any violence of my poor friend Bruton, he met his wounds.

And now the skein was unravelled, and the whole dark maze of evil laid open to the light. This woman, it was plain, had had in her mind the removal at once of her brother and the child, who both stood between her and the immense property of her father—a property which she had dreamt of and hoped for so long, that it began to be to her a thing more to be desired than heaven itself, and which, upon her father's death, when she had fondly hoped to grasp it, she found bestowed upon an illegitimate mulatto. Bruton's violence of temper, his jealousy, and his having frequently denounced curses and threats against his wife and her child, afforded her an opportunity, she believed, of ridding herself of both by one happy stroke; an opportunity of which she so successfully availed herself, as you have seen, unaware that in the act she was becoming the double murderess of her own offspring. But this was not all the sin consummated at the old Grange. There were other crimes, heinous and intricate, which I will not call up to pollute my pages again withal; suffice it that each met a punishment, even in this world, dreadful as its own dark nature.

In two hours after delivering this narration our patient was delirious, inflammation of the membranes of the brain had come on, a common consequence of the operation of the trephine.

I felt myself now placed in a situation of much embarrassment with regard to my proceedings. Should I give information against her on the strength of this statement, or not? I was perplexed with doubt. In the first place, from my ignorance of law, I was not sure that a person could be accused of a crime of which another person had already been convicted, and for which that person had been condemned; next, how could I convince a jury that the whole statement was not a mere portion of the delirious ravings of the patient, especially since these had commenced so closely upon his delivery that it ran into them? Impressed with these considerations, I resolved to take advise before I committed myself.

I took the opportunity, however, that same evening to communicate the account I had received to her, a step for which I shall perhaps incur your censure. We stood together in one of the windows. As I proceeded she became pale as a corpse, and, aware seemingly of this, turned her back to the glass, thus throwing her face into shade. She heard me out, standing erect as a statue, only I noticed she clutched firmly a broad brass knob that served to hold aside the curtains. When I had done,

"Now, sir," said she, "I know not which to admire the most, the extra vagance of my poor son's raving, if you have told me truth, or your egregious folly in believing it, or thinking to make it a bugbear with

which to frighten me for whatever proceedings you may adopt you will find me prepared: only anything you may say derogatory to my character will be at your peril. In the meantime you will oblige me by immediately leaving my house. I will take care"

Here she was interrupted by a servant, who entered hurriedly with

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Madam, madam, the young master is dead!"

It came upon her like a thunderbolt. She fell back at once against the window, shivering the glass and cutting her neck and arms.

as I saw in her signs of recovery, I left the room and the house. that night this woman was never more seen.

the room.

As soon

After

I slept at the old inn of the Traveller's Joy, now kept by strangers. Shortly after midnight I was awakened by a glow of light illuminating I was much startled at this, and on going to the window to ascertain its cause, was struck by beholding a bright flame rising over the woods in the direction of the Grange. I stood gazing for a while. Presently I heard windows thrown up in the village, then voices speaking quickly and anxiously, then bolts withdrawn, doors opened, then heavy footsteps hurrying rapidly along. Anon the whole place was aroused, and all was commotion.

Before morning the old Grange was burnt to the ground, fit end for a scene of such accumulated evil. The more modern division, however, remained uninjured comparatively, a double gable of brick and stone having separated the two.

The only human being that was missing was the lady of the mansion, and some bones having been found among the ruins in a calcined and half-charred state, were pronounced to be her remains by a coroner's jury, their verdict being death by accidental fire. These bones afterwards came temporarily into my possession. To the subjects of osteology and natural history I had devoted much attention, and had studied closely the papers of M. Desmoulins on these points.

The skull was very marked; the cranium being much compressed, the forehead depressed, and what are called the alveolor processes of the upper jaw projecting obliquely. From these and other particulars I was enabled with absolute accuracy to pronounce them the bones of a female of the negro race. Of this I was perfectly certain, and there was as little doubt that they formed the remains of the Obi sorceress. In further prosecuting the search among the ruins, way was made into a little arched coal-cellar. In this was found a small uncouthly-shaped apparatus, which proved to be a still of an exceedingly singular and primitive description. Beside it lay a bag of leaves, stems, and flowers. One look showed them to be those of the PRUNUS LAUROCERASUS, or poison laurel. Whether the other woman perished in the fire or not I could never ascertain; neither can I tell the ulterior fate of Bruton's wife. She had disappeared during my absence on the continent, and I never heard of her

after.

Lilias, the Forsaken.

PART I.

THERE is a certain great city within the shores of these islands, which we shall indicate by two letters of the alphabet, with a minus between, thus, A-z. This is not from any fear of detection in untruth, were we to name the actual place where our characters acted-our incidents occurred; but among divers other weighty reasons (the concealment of our own particular whereabouts being not the least influential,) because we are aware that such mystic symbols for places, along with duly musical names for personages, heighten in a great degree the feelings of inte\rest and delight wherewith any narrative is perused.

Again: each reader, on meeting with such an algebraical denomination for a place, has less difficulty in attaching to it the idea of his own parti cular scene and his own peculiar sympathies.

"Bless me! it is nothing but London," cries one.

"Dublin! by all the goddesses," shouts another.

A third swears by York, and a fourth is ready to do battle for Brum

magem.

But thou, fairest, whose small white fingers are now pressing asunder the leaves of this book-fingers which I have watched, night after night, as they danced, twinkling in fairy flutterings over the ivory keys, the while my heart swelled within me, flooded with the melody they elicited; thou who wert for years the confidant of my hopes and schemes, my joys and griefs; of friends, my most beloved, though not my love; well knowest thou the noble city I allude to, and sweet, sweet, albeit lost to me, will be the smile wherewith will be welcomed each lineament of its description

A-z stands on a broad and fertile plain on the banks of a great river. This plain is from one to four or five miles wide, and is bounded by some elevations, which a Scot or a Welshman could hardly find it in his heart to call hills. Close to the base of the more northerly of these ranges flows the stream, westwards. Along the side of the southern again, a beautifully-winding canal has been conducted. It was intended to connect the town with a rich mining district, but never was completed, and is little used.

Between the river and the canal stretches, south-westward, a district called the Woodlands, which has been chosen by several of the magnates of the city as the site for their country domains. It is a level and extremely fertile piece of alluvial land, studded with one or two abrupt, rocky, wood-covered hillocks, rising like islands, and everywhere intersected by a labyrinth of small roads and green-hedged lanes, leading between the mansions, and from them to the highways, the river, or the canal.

Most of these lanes are bordered with trees, some of them completely overshadowed and covered in for considerable distances, looking like tun