The Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine -- Volume
54, No. 335, September 1843, by Various

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine -- Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843

Author: Various

Release Date: January 21, 2005 [EBook #14753]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE ***

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and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXXXV. SEPTEMBER, 1843. VOL. LIV.

* * * * *

"WE ARE ALL LOW PEOPLE THERE."

A TALE OF THE ASSIZES.

IN TWO CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER THE FIRST.

Some time ago, business of an important character carried me to the
beautiful and populous city of ----. I remember to have visited it when I
was a child, in the company of a doating mother, who breathed her last
there; and the place, associated with that circumstance, had ever
afterwards been the gloomiest spot in the county of my birth. A calamity
such as that to which I have alluded leaves no _half_ impressions. It
stamps itself deep, deep in the human heart; and a change, scarcely less
than organic, for good or ill, is wrought there. Agreeably with this
fact, the scene itself of the event becomes at once, to the survivor,
either hallowed and beloved, or hated and avoided. Not that natural
beauty or deformity has any thing to do in the production of such
feelings. They have a mysterious origin, and are, in truth, not to be
accounted for or explained. A father sees the hope and joy of his manhood
deposited amongst the gardens of the soil, and from that moment the
fruitful fields and unobstructed sky are things he cannot gaze upon;
whilst the brother, who has lived in the court or alley of a crowded city
with the sister of his infancy, and has buried her, with his burning
tears, in the dense churchyard of the denser street, clings to the
neighbourhood, close and unhealthy though it be, with a love that renders
it for him the brightest and the dearest nook of earth. He cannot quit
it, and be at peace. Causes that seem alike, ar