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CHAPTER IV.

Adieu, poor luckless maiden! Imbibe the oil and wine which the compassion of a stranger, as he journeyeth on his way, now pours into thy wounds: the Being who has twice bruised thee can only bind them up for ever."

STERNE.

THE corpse arrived at the house of St. Clyde ; and by this time the neighbouring people were tumultuously assembled, vowing vengeance on the perpetrator of the horrid crime. A tradition had obtained amongst them from time immemorial, that if the murderer but touched the corpse he had destroyed, blood would be seen on the body of the corpse, and likewise on the murderer's finger: the people urged this to be the test of guilt.

The dominie and the minister de

clared this was all superstition; but the people, conscious in the strength of their innocence, would not be put off by any attempts on the learned folks' part, to scout what all their grandfathers told them had happened in their great grandfathers' days.

The body was taken into the house; and the crowd with difficulty ceased to persist in the application of their greatgrandfathers' talisman, Levingstone's heart was wrung to its innermost core, with grief and sorrow at the distress of this family; but he did not give way to to their external signs, as Ellen St. Clyde, perfectly miserable and inconsolable, needed all the soothing care and tender sympathy which could be bestowed, and Levingstone was very peculiarly fitted to bind up the brokenhearted, and minister comfort to the afflicted. His mind, untainted by the slavish passions which estrange man

from man, and teach dissolute youth to be more attentive to the extrava. gances of a wasteful mistress, than to her to whom Nature points her fin ger, and says, "Foolish youth, this virtuous lovely girl is of the same blood as thy affectionate friend, and, willing to show a pleasing variety in my works, I have condescended to have the matter whereof she was formed, pass twice through my hands, in order to soften and dulcify her temper, and meliorate her composition even to mellifluence; besides these pre-eminent qualities, she merits as much thy esteem and time, as she is allied to thee by misfortune and misery.

"She on whom, with lavish hand and thoughtless. guilty, lustful heart, the dissolute bestows all his wealth, is a viper; take her not into thy bosom; the remembrance of her will sting thee

with remorse, and the thoughts of her prodigality and ingratitude will haunt thy miserable old age, down to the silent tomb. Go to Ellen St. Clyde, and embrace her as the sister of thy friend Colin; love her as thou lovest the soul of her brother, and suffer the afflictions into which this family catastrophe has plunged her, to bind her yet closer to thy bosom.'

The eldest Miss St. Clyde just expired as the corpse of her father was brought into the house; and the mother was beginning to be roused from her stupor and insensibility, by the final paroxyms of the most awful, sudden, and destructive madness that ever mortal had been visited with, when somebody had attempted to tell her that "St. Clyde's body was found in Ambrisbeg loch, a cord tied very fastly round his neck, and that there was no

doubt remaining, but that somebody had strangled him, and cast his body into the loch."

The poor maniac mother, by an ef fort with which the strength of her disease alone could furnish her, threw herself from the bed, half out of the chamber door, and instantly expired!

The scene this house presented to the view of Levingstone and the minister, was intrinsically awful. The surviving Miss St. Clyde could bear up against this dreadful shock no longer; and if piety, disinterested kindness, and numerous and officious comforters could, in this trying hour, tie up the bonds of affliction in their own bosom to relieve this distracted young lady, there were not wanting the generous sympathetic heart, and the consolations of heaven-born piety, to be fettered in those bonds.

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