employing
what is his own to his own profit? Besides, I did speak to him, and he
very readily and civilly promised that if he found bones or monuments,
they should be carefully respected and reinstated; and what more could I
ask? So, the first stone they found bore the name of Margaret Bothwell,
1585, and I have caused it to be laid carefully aside, as I think it
betokens death, and having served my namesake two hundred years, it has
just been cast up in time to do me the same good turn. My house has been
long put in order, as far as the small earthly concerns require it; but
who shall say that their account with, Heaven is sufficiently revised?"

"After what you have said, aunt," I replied, "perhaps I ought to take my
hat and go away; and so I should, but that there is on this occasion a
little alloy mingled with your devotion. To think of death at all times
is a duty--to suppose it nearer from the finding an old gravestone is
superstition; and you, with your strong, useful common sense, which was
so long the prop of a fallen family, are the last person whom I should
have suspected of such weakness."

"Neither would I deserve your suspicions, kinsman," answered Aunt
Margaret, "if we were speaking of any incident occurring in the actual
business of human life. But for all this, I have a sense of superstition
about me, which I do not wish to part with. It is a feeling which
separates me from this age, and links me with that to which I am
hastening; and even when it seems, as now, to lead me to the brink
of the grave, and bid me gaze on it, I do not love that it should be
dispelled. It soothes my imagination, without influencing my reason or
conduct."

"I profess, my good lady," replied I, "that had any one but you made
such a declaration, I should have thought it as capricious as that of
the clergyman, who, without vindicating his false reading, preferred,
from habit's sake, his old Mumpsimus to the modern Sumpsimus."

"Well," answered my aunt, "I must explain my inconsistency in this
particular by comparing it to another. I am, as you know, a piece of
that old-fashioned thing called a Jacobite; but I am so in sentiment and
feeling only, for a more loyal subject never joined in prayers for the
health and wealth of George the Fourth, whom God long preserve! But I
dare say that kind-hearted sovereign would not deem that an old woman
did him much injury if she leaned back in her arm-chair, just in such
a twilight as thi