of an ordinary description, which the
warlike propensities of her foster son kept in pretty constant exercise.

"Come now," she said, "son Henry, unfold your arms from about my
patient, though she is worth the pressing, and set thy hands at freedom
to help me with what I want. Nay, I will not insist on your quitting
her hand, if you will beat the palm gently, as the fingers unclose their
clenched grasp."

"I beat her slight, beautiful hand!" said Henry; "you were as well bid
me beat a glass cup with a forehammer as tap her fair palm with my horn
hard fingers. But the fingers do unfold, and we will find a better way
than beating"; and he applied his lips to the pretty hand, whose motion
indicated returning sensation. One or two deep sighs succeeded, and
the Fair Maid of Perth opened her eyes, fixed them on her lover, as
he kneeled by the bedside, and again sunk back on the pillow. As she
withdrew not her hand from her lover's hold or from his grasp, we must
in charity believe that the return to consciousness was not so complete
as to make her aware that he abused the advantage, by pressing it
alternately to his lips and his bosom. At the same time we are compelled
to own that the blood was colouring in her cheek, and that her breathing
was deep and regular, for a minute or two during this relapse.

The noise at the door began now to grow much louder, and Henry was
called for by all his various names of Smith. Gow, and Hal of the Wynd,
as heathens used to summon their deities by different epithets. At last,
like Portuguese Catholics when exhausted with entreating their saints,
the crowd without had recourse to vituperative exclamations.

"Out upon you, Henry! You are a disgraced man, man sworn to your burgher
oath, and a traitor to the Fair City, unless you come instantly forth!"

It would seem that nurse Shoolbred's applications were now so far
successful that Catharine's senses were in some measure restored; for,
turning her face more towards that of her lover than her former posture
permitted, she let her right hand fall on his shoulder, leaving her left
still in his possession, and seeming slightly to detain him, while she
whispered: "Do not go, Henry--stay with me; they will kill thee, these
men of blood."

It would seem that this gentle invocation, the result of finding the
lover alive whom she expected to have only recognised as a corpse,
though it was spoken so low as scarcely to be intelligible, had more
e