eing a slave. I allowed
the vessel to sail without me, wound up my affairs, and bade adieu for
ever to the slave States. 'Tis now twenty years since I purchased a
wife, after I had won her love, and I bless the day she was made mine;
for I have had uninterrupted happiness in her and her offspring. The
slave is now the happy wife and mother of five lovely children, who
rejoice in their mother. After remaining some years in Leeds, I returned
to Edinburgh. Widow Neil was dead; but one day I discovered, by mere
chance, that the murder I committed in her house was on a _sheep_.

MY BLACK COAT;

OR,

THE BREAKING OF THE BRIDE'S CHINA.

Gentle reader, the simple circumstances I am about to relate to you,
hang upon what is termed--a bad omen. There are few amongst the
uneducated who have not a degree of faith in omens; and even amongst the
better educated and well informed there are many who, while they profess
to disbelieve them, and, indeed, do disbelieve them, yet feel them in
their hours of solitude. I have known individuals who, in the hour of
danger, would have braved the cannon's mouth, or defied death to his
teeth, who, nevertheless, would have buried their heads in the
bedclothes at the howling of a dog at midnight, or spent a sleepless
night from hearing the tick, tick, of the spider, or the untiring song
of the kitchen-fire musician--the jolly little cricket. The age of
omens, however, is drawing to a close; for truth in its progress is
trampling delusion of every kind under its feet; yet, after all, though
a belief in omens is a superstition, it is one that carries with it a
portion of the poetry of our nature. But to proceed with our story.

Several years ago I was on my way from B---- to Edinburgh; and
being as familiar with every cottage, tree, shrub, and whin-bush on the
Dunbar and Lauder roads as with the face of an acquaintance, I made
choice of the less-frequented path by Longformacus. I always took a
secret pleasure in contemplating the dreariness of wild spreading
desolation; and, next to looking on the sea when its waves dance to the
music of a hurricane, I loved to gaze on the heath-covered wilderness,
where the blue horizon only girded its purple bosom. It was no season
to look upon the heath in the beauty of barrenness, yet I purposely
diverged from the main road. About an hour, therefore, after I had
descended from the region on the Lammermoors, and entered the Lothians,
I became sensible