uld shoot her through the head." Partly through fear, and partly from
the goodness and rectitude of her mind, Lady Lovat devoted her
attentions so entirely to the care of the delicate and motherless boy,
that she saved his life, and won his filial reverence and affection by
her attention. He loved her as a real parent. The skill in nursing and
in the practical part of medicine thus acquired, was never lost; and
Lady Lovat was noted ever after, among those who knew her, as the "old
lady of the faculty."

Family archives, it is said, reveal a tissue of almost unprecedented
acts of cruelty towards this excellent lady. They were borne with the
same spirit that in all her life guided her conduct,--a strict
dependance upon Providence. She regarded her calamities as trials, or
tests, sent from Heaven, and received them with meek submission. In
after years, during the peaceful decline of her honoured life, when a
house near her residence in Blackfriars Wynd, Edinburgh, took fire, she
sat calmly knitting a stocking, and watching, occasionally, the progress
of the flames. The magistrates and ministers came, in vain, to entreat
her to leave her house in a sedan; she refused, saying, that if her hour
was come, it was in vain for her to think of eluding her fate: if it
were not come, she was safe where she was. At length she permitted the
people around her to fling wet blankets over the house, by which it was
protected from the sparks.

She seems, however, to have made considerable exertions to rid herself
from an unholy bond with her husband. Like many other Scottish ladies of
quality, in those days, her education had been limited; and it was not
until late in life that she acquired the art of writing, which she then
learned by herself without a master. She never attained the more
difficult process of spelling accurately.

She now, however, contrived to make herself understood by her friends in
this her dire distress: and to acquaint them with her situation and
injuries, by rolling a letter up in a clue of yarn, and dropping it out
of her window to a confidential person below. Her family then
interfered, and the wretched lady was released, by a legal separation,
from her miseries. She retired to the house of her sister, and
eventually to Edinburgh. When, in after times, her grand nephews and
nieces crowded around her, she would talk to them of these days of
sorrow. "Listen, bairns," she was known to observe, "the events of my
li