appeared decided in his opinion. If it happened to be unfavourable, he suddenly went to a distance with every appearance of disgust; if favourable, he shewed a disposition to become more intimate, and expressed by his countenance more or less satisfaction.'

Laura Bridgman, who was visited by the late Mr Charles Dickens during his first visit to America, was not only blind, deaf, and dumb, but was also deprived almost wholly of the sense of smell. Touch and taste were her only two media of communication with the outer world. She did not, therefore, furnish an illustration of the particular subject we are here discussing.

In 1758, a lady was attacked with small-pox of such terrible severity that she became blind, deaf, and dumb, and almost incapable of taking any kind of nourishment. Her case was described in the Philosophical Transactions. The knowledge of her infirmities rendered her averse to being seen by strangers, and her friends were obliged to adopt precautions to prevent this. One day a friend called upon her, went up to her chamber, and urged her to come down-stairs and sit with the rest of the family; this she probably urged through the medium of some kind of finger-alphabet; and, to induce her to comply, added that there would be no strangers present. The sufferer at length consented, and went down to the parlour; but no sooner was the door opened, than she started back, and withdrew to her chamber in much displeasure, alleging that there were strangers in the room, and that an attempt had been made to impose upon her. The fact was that strangers had entered the room while the friend had gone up-stairs, so that she had not known of their being there. When the patient was assured on this point, she became pacified. In reply to a question, she stated that she knew them to be strangers by the sense of smell.

In connection with the olfactory sense, we may mention that a lady once publicly advertised for a cure for its deprivation. She addressed the Gentleman's Magazine thus, in 1800: 'A constant reader would esteem it a favour if any of your medical correspondents could point out a remedy for a loss of the sense of smelling. I think it necessary to state my case as exact as possible. I am thirty-five years of age, and have always been subject to a stuffing of the nose whenever I take cold. I have for the last four or five years lost entirely the smell of flowers, which I am particularly fond of, and am in the habit of cultivating them for my amusement. Anything strong and disagreeable I can always smell, unless I have a cold. I have applied to several of the faculty, but none of them have given me satisfactory relief.' We do not find that this lady had any favourable response to her query.

A sensible attempt was made in one of our colonies, not usually deemed very deep in philosophy, to obtain for the sense of smell some such measure, standard, or data as we possess in regard to the photometric estimate of light, the prismatic estimate of colours, the thermometric and pyrometric estimate of heat, the vibratory estimate of the pitch of sounds, and other phenomena which affect the senses of sight, touch, and hearing. The Barbadoes Society of Arts, in 1786, offered gold medals for the discovery of a mode of distinctly ascertaining by some scale or standard (similar, analogous, or equivalent to the proportional dura

tion of the monochord in music, or to the prismatic distinction of colours), whereby the progress, order, and enumeration of the primary tastes, or of the primary smells, may be clearly arranged in apt words, and so demonstratively discriminated and ascertained as the notes of music, or the primary prismatic colours are.' Certain it is that we do not, down to the present time, possess such guides, standards, or meters as are here indicated.

THE SEA-FOG.

UPON the cliff's steep edge I stand;

The moaning sea I hear

But gray mists hang o'er sea and land, The mists that sailors fear.

The lichened rocks, the mosses red

With silver drops are sown;
Each crimson foxglove hangs its head
Amid the old gray stone.

The fearful rock within the bay,

Where gallant ships go down, Shews but a faint white line of spray, A glimmering mass of brown.

A broken boat, a spot of black,

Is tossed on sullen waves,
Their crests all dark with rifted wrack,
The spoil of ocean caves.

Now sails my love on sea to-day;

Heaven shield his boat from harm! Heaven keep him from the dangerous bay, Till winds and waves be calm! Oh, would he sat beside our stove,

Where mother turns her wheel; I know too soon, for you, my love,

What wives of sailors feel.

Oh, that within the wood-fire's glow,
He told us tales of yore,

Of perils over long ago,

And ventures come to shore.

His hand belike is on the helmi;

The fog has hid the foam;
The surf that shall his boat o'erwhelm,

He thinks the beach at home.

He sees a lamp amid the dark,
He thinks our pane alight;
And haply on some storm-bound bark,
He founders in the night.

Now God be with you; He who gave
Our constant love and troth;
Where'er your oar may dip the wave,

You bear the hearts of both.

Through storm and mist, God keep my love,
That I may hear once more
Your boat upon the shingled cove,

Your step upon the shore.

No. 551.

STORY OF LADY GRANGE. IN the western environs of Edinburgh lies the estate of Dalry, once entirely rural, with a spacious mansion situated in a park, and sheltered on the north by a grove of tall trees. The mansion remains, but the property is now almost covered with houses, intersected with streets, and cut up with a line of railway.

In the days of its rural beauty, towards the end of the seventeenth century, Dalry belonged to a person named Chiesley, a man of considerable ability, but with violent passions, and indeed not altogether sane. He was one of those contentious beings with whom it is dangerous to have any dealings, particularly where money is concerned. Chiesley was married. He had a wife and children, and he used them so badly that they were forced to leave him. Their desertion he did not mind, but he felt dreadfully annoyed at the idea of their claiming from him some means of subsistence. His wife's claim for a separate maintenance threw him into a rage, and the rage rose to a kind of frenzy when she appealed to the law for an aliment. The Court of Session granted an allowance of ninety-three pounds per annum, chargeable on the estate of Dalry. The judge chiefly concerned in giving this reasonable and humane decision was the Lord President, Sir George Lockhart.

have

Chiesley meditated revenge. The Lord President, as he considered, had done him a wrong, and he did not hesitate to avow openly that he would vengeance. He even wrote a threatening letter to his lordship. Strangely enough, the President took no notice of his threats, possibly looking upon them with pity and contempt. Knowing the character of the man, he ought not to have been so indulgent. Even in our own times, however, we are not without an instance of fatal indifference to the denunciations of a madman. For an imaginary offence, Bellingham threatened Mr Perceval with vengeance, and was suffered to go at large until he assassinated that unfortunate minister. The case of Chiesley and the Lord President closely resembled that of Bellingham and Mr Perceval.

PRICE 1d.

We are to throw ourselves in imagination back to the state of affairs in Edinburgh shortly after the Revolution. The Stewarts are dethroned, but the castle still holds out for the exiled family. The town is full of the troops of the new government. It is Sunday morning, the 31st of March 1689. Divine service in the several churches into which St Giles' is divided, is about to begin. At the door of one of these churches, where the Lord President has his seat, hovers moodily a tall gentleman wearing a cocked-hat, with one of his hands thrust into the pocket of his coat, and grasping a loaded pistol. It is Chiesley of Dalry. He enters the church, and offers the beadle money to place him in a seat immediately behind that of the Lord President; but the pew is already filled, and he has to go to another part of the church. Chiesley's intention was to shoot his victim in the very middle of the service, and it was only by the accident of the pew being occupied that he could not carry out his design.

At the conclusion of the service, the madman, for we must call him so, preceded the Lord President to the head of the Old Bank Close, a lane situated within less than a hundred yards of the church. It was in this lane that his lordship resided. While he was walking down towards his dwelling, talking to some friends, Chiesley came behind him and shot him through the back; the bullet going in beneath the right shoulder, and out at the left breast. The President immediately turned about, looked the murderer mournfully in the face, and then finding himself falling, he leant to the wall, and asked his friends to hold him. He was carried to his own house, and was almost dead before he reached it. His wife hearing the shot and a cry in the close, rushed out, and took the body in her arms, but immediately swooned. The assassin did not offer to flee. He owned the fact, and was carried off to prison. Chiesley was tried by the magistrates for murder, condemned, and was hanged at the Cross of Edinburgh, with the pistol depending from his neck, and his body was thereafter hung in chains at Drumsheuch. This latter indignity was too much for his friends.

They stole away the body, and buried it underneath the hearthstone of a cottage at Dalry. There, a skeleton, along with the remains of a pistol, were found in recent times, in the course of some alterations.

We have recalled this tragical occurrence as preliminary to the story of a lady, the daughter of Chiesley, on whose character some light is thrown by the conduct of her father.

Rachel Chiesley made what many thought a better marriage than could have been expected by the daughter of an executed felon, even although that felon had been a landed gentleman. She was married to James Erskine of Grange, an advocate at the Scottish bar, and brother of the Earl of Mar, who was attainted for the part he took in the rebellion of 1715. It was a daring thing for Erskine to ally himself to her, for she was known to have a violent temper, and to be somewhat irregular in her habits. The marriage took place about 1707, the year in which Erskine was raised to be a judge in the Court of Session, when he assumed the judicial title of Lord Grange. A judge's wife does not by usage take the title of lady, and why Mrs Erskine should have been habitually styled Lady Grange has never received a proper explanation. As Lady Grange she has always been spoken of, and so too we will call her. For some years the married pair lived pretty harmoniously. Sometimes there were bickerings, but they were smoothed over by the husband temporising as well as he could with his wife's unfortunate infirmity. They lived in a house in Edinburgh, situated in a court at the foot of Niddry's Wynd, a broadish alley leading from the High Street, near the site of the present Niddry Street. There they had a family of children, and kept up a stylish way of living.

At length there was discord-open war-in the household. According to the account of the lady, there had been love and peace for twenty-five years, when all at once Lord Grange took a dislike to her, and would no longer live with her: they must, he said, live separately, he giving her a maintenance of a hundred a year. Forced to agree to this arrangement, in 1730 the lady was sent to reside in the country-discharged from ever setting her foot in Niddry's Wynd. If she did, it would be the worse for her. The hundred a year would be stopped. The account of matters by Lord Grange differed very materially from that of his wife. He said he had suffered long from her unsubduable rage and madness, and had failed in all his efforts to bring her to a reasonable conduct. It is too probable that the latter statement is the true one; although were it more so, it would still leave Lord Grange unjustifiable in the measures he took with respect to his wife. It is traditionally stated, that in their unhappy quarrels, the lady fiercely reminded his lordship whose daughter she was-darkly hinting that she could resort to means of vengeance like her father, and little more would induce her to do so. Grange became alarmed for his personal safety, and no wonder. But he had other grounds for apprehension. He had carried on some intercourse with Jacobites disaffected to the government, and this the lady had it in her power to make known, and which, if revealed, would at least have compromised his position as a judge. One can with difficulty be brought to believe that a wife would

deliberately and maliciously try to ruin one whom by a solemn vow she is bound to love, honour, and obey. But such things are. The daughter of Chiesley of Dalry, in her mad imaginings, was fit for this degree of heartlessness and villainy.

Random accusations without proof would have been of little avail. The lady had a document in her possession to prove that her husband was a traitor. In the statement of Lord Grange, he tells us that some time before the separation, he had gone to London to arrange the private affairs of the Countess of Mar, then become unable to conduct them herself, and he had sent an account of his procedure to his wife, including some reflections on Sir Robert Walpole, who had thwarted him much, and been of serious detriment to the interests of his family. This document she retained, and she threatened to take it to London, and use it for her husband's disadvantage, being supported in the design by several persons with whom she associated. While denying that he had been concerned in anything treasonable, Lord Grange says, 'he had already too great a load of that great minister Walpole's wrath on his back, to stand still and see more of it fall upon him by treachery and madness of such a wife and such confederates.'

Rather an unpleasant posture of affairs this for Lord Grange. He had a faint hope that things might mend. Her ladyship might calm down. She had gone to the country, and a sight of the beauties of nature-the birds, the trees, and the flowers, to say nothing of the hundred a year, might work wonders on that troubled brain. It was a vain expectation. Lady Grange soon became tired of the country. It was dull and stupid. There was nobody to speak to who understood her exalted notions. Careless of forfeiting her hundred a year, back she came to town, and, like a fury let loose, exhibited herself in the antique court at Niddry's Wynd. There she was, flourishing about with her arms, haranguing porters, chairmen, and footmen, as to her wrongs, and declaring how she would shew up and finish her husband to his lasting disgrace and ruin. We can fancy the horror of Lord Grange in looking out of window upon the uproar in the little court, and seeing his wife declaiming to the party-coloured multitude. 'The Guard,' an old-fashioned military police in the army uniform of George I. was, of course, sent for, on which she vanished, but was never long in again coming upon the scene. She stamped, she raved, shouted at the windows, followed his lordship in the street, and behaved altogether like a maniac. What was to be done?

Lord Grange could have stood the stamping and raving, and borne a good deal besides, but the demoniac threat to report him to Walpole was in his point of view more than flesh and blood could bear. It was the last feather that breaks the horse's back. Now for prompt measures. No one can justify what he did. It was illegal, and for one in the position of a judge, it was disgraceful. Instead of seeking the protection of the law, he arbitrarily resolved to get his wife carried off by force, and furtively sent into exile. He called it 'sequestrating her; the proper term was robbing her of her liberty, and this outrage he was able to effect by concerting measures with a number of Highland chiefs, including the notorious Lord Lovat, who above all had reason to apprehend certain political disclosures,

On the evening of the 22d of January 1732, a party of Highlanders, wearing the livery of Lord Lovat, made their way into the lodgings of Lady Grange. Forcibly seizing her, throwing her down and gagging her, and then tying a cloth over her head, they carried her off as if she had been a corpse. At the bottom of the stair was a chair containing a man, who took the hapless lady upon his knees, and held her fast in his arms till they had got to a place in the outskirts of the town. There they took her from the chair, removed the cloth from her head, and mounted her upon a horse behind a man, to whom she was tied; after which the party rode off all by the light of the moon,' to quote the language of the old ballads, whose incidents the present story resembles in character.

If we can believe her own account, Lady Grange experienced no very gentle treatment. The leader of the gang, Mr Forster of Corsebonny, though a gentleman by station, would not allow her to stop for the relief of a cramp in her side, and only answered by ordering a servant to renew the bandages over her mouth. After a ride of nearly twenty miles, they stopped at Muiravonside, the house of MrJohn Macleod, advocate, where servants appeared waiting to receive the lady; and thus it is shewn that the master of the house had been engaged to aid in her abduction. She was taken up-stairs to a comfortable bedroom; but a man being posted in the room as a guard, she could not go to bed or take any repose. In this manner she spent the ensuing day, and when it was night, she was taken out and remounted in the same fashion as before; and the party then rode along through the Torwood, and so to the place called Wester Polmaise, belonging to a gentleman of the name of Stewart, whose steward or factor was one of the cavalcade. Here was an old tower, having one little room on each floor, as is usually the case in such buildings; and into one of these rooms, the window of which was boarded over, the lady was conducted. She continued here for thirteen or fourteen weeks, supplied with a sufficiency of the comforts of life, but never allowed to go into the open air; till at length her health gave way, and the factor began to fear being concerned in her death. By his intercession with Mr Forster, she was then permitted to go into the court, under a guard; but such was the rigour of her keepers, that she was not permitted to walk in the garden. Thus time passed drearily on until the month of August, during all which time the prisoner had no communication with the external world. At length, by an arrangement made between Lord Lovat and Mr Forster, at the house of the latter, near Stirling, Lady Grange was one night forcibly brought out, and mounted again as formerly, and carried off amidst a guard of horsemen. She recognised several of Lovat's people in this troop, and found Forster once more in command. They passed by Stirling Bridge, and thence onward to the Highlands; but she no longer knew the way they were going. Before daylight they stopped at a house, where she was lodged during the day, and at night the march was resumed. Thus they journeyed for several days into the Highlands,

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never allowing the unfortunate lady to speak, and taking the most rigid care to prevent any one from becoming aware of her situation. During this time she never had off her clothes. One day she slept in a barn, another in an open inclosure. Regard to delicacy in such a case was impossible. After a fortnight spent at a house on Lord Lovat's ground (probably in Stratherrick, Inverness-shire), the journey was renewed in the same style as before; only Mr Forster had retired from the party, and the lady found herself entirely in the hands of Frasers.

They now crossed a loch into Glengarry's land, where they lodged several nights in cow-houses, or in the open air, making progress all the time to the westward, where the country becomes extremely wild. At Lochourn, an arm of the sea on the west coast, the unfortunate lady was transferred to a small vessel which was in waiting for her. Bitterly did she weep, and pitifully implore compassion; but the Highlanders understood not her language; and though they had done so, a departure from the orders which had been given them was not to be expected from men of their character. In the vessel, she found that she was in the custody of Alexander Macdonald, a tenant of one of the Western Islands named Heskir, belonging to Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat.

The unfortunate lady remained in Macdonald's charge at Heskir nearly two years-during the first year without once seeing bread, and with no supply of clothing; obliged, in fact, to live in the same miserable way as the rest of the family; afterwards some little indulgence was shewn to her. This island was of desolate aspect, and had no inhabitant besides Macdonald and his wife. The wretchedness of such a situation for a lady who had been all her life accustomed to the refined society of a capital, may easily be imagined.

In June 1734, a sloop came to Heskir to take away the lady; it was commanded by a Macleod, and in it she was conveyed to the remotest spot of ground connected with the British Islandsnamely, the isle of St Kilda, the property of the chief of Macleod, and remarkable for the simple character of the poor peasantry who occupy it. There cannot, of course, be a doubt, that those who had an interest in the seclusion of Lady Grange, regarded this as a more eligible place than Heskir, in as far as it was more out of the way, and promised better for her complete and permanent confinement. In some respects it was an advantageous change for the lady: the place was not uninhabited, as Heskir very nearly was; and her domestic accommodation was better. In St Kilda, she was placed in a house or cottage of two small apartments, tolerably well furnished, with a girl to wait upon her, and provided with a sufficiency of good food and clothing. Of educated persons the island contained not one, except for a short time a clergyman, named Roderick Maclennan. There was hardly even a person capable of speaking or understanding the English language within reach. No books, no intelligence from the world in which she had once lived. Only once a year did a steward come to collect the rent paid in kind by the poor people; and by him was the lady regularly furnished with a store of such articles, foreign to the place, as she neededusually a stone of sugar, a pound of tea, six pecks