ghgoing decent pacers of the world's stage.

"Ah! now we're all safe, as poor Charlie will be to-morrow," she cried,
as they got to the foot of the long row, and she emerged in the light of
one of the lamps, so like a flash from a cloud, running before her
mother to get her to walk faster and faster, as if some scheme she had
in her head was loitering under the impediment of her mother's wearied,
oh, wearied step.

Having at length reached home, Jeannie ran and got the fire as bright as
her own eye, crying out occasionally, as she glanced about,

"Poor Charlie in a dungeon!" and again, a few minutes after, when
puffing at the fire with the bellows,

"No fire for dear Charlie; all dark and dismal!"

And then, running for the little paper packet with the cheese and bread,
and setting it down,

"But he'll see the sun to-morrow, and will sleep in his own bed
to-morrow night too; that he shall. Now eat, mother, for you will be
hungry; and see you this!" as she took from her pocket a very tiny
bottle, which would hold somewhere about a glass.

"Take that," filling out a little whisky.

"Oh dear, dear bairn, where learnt ye a' that witchery?" said the
mother, looking at her.

But the sly look, sometimes without a trace of laughter in her face, was
the only answer.

And now they are stretched in bed in each other's arms; but it was a
restless night for both. And how different the manifestations of the
restlessness! The groans of the elder for the fate of her only boy, now
suspended on the scales of justice--one branch of the balance to be lopt
off by Nemesis, and the other left with a noose in the string whereon to
hang that erring, yet still beloved son; hysterical laughs from Jeannie
in her dreams, as she saw herself undo the kench, and Charlie let out,
clapping his hands, and praying too, and kissing Jeannie, and other
fantastic tricks of fancy in her own domain, unburdened with heavy clay
which soils and presses upon her wings and binds her to earth, and to
these monstrous likenesses of things, which she says are all a lying
nature under the bonds of a blind fate, from where she cannot get free,
even though she screams of murder and oppression and cruelty, and all
the ills that earth-born flesh inherits from the first man.

Yet, for all these deductions from the sleep they needed, Jeannie was up
in the morning early, infusing tea for herself and mother, muttering, as
she whisked about,

"No breakfast for him