Kursaal. The English servant, after a time,
told Harriet that the dinner she had ordered
from a restaurant had been sent in; should it
be served, or would she wait longer for Mr.
Routh?

Dinner might be served, Harriet answered.
Still she did not leave the window. Presently
an open carriage, drawn by grey ponies, whirled
by. Mrs. P. Ireton Bembridge was unaccompanied,
except by her groom. The carriage
went towards the Schwarzchild House. She
was going to dine at home, probably. The
servant asked if she should close the blinds.
No, Harriet preferred them left as they were;
and when she had made a pretence of dining,
she once more took her place by the window.
Lights were brought, but she carried them to
the table in the corner of the room, where her
desk stood, and sat in the shadow, looking
out upon the street. Soon the street became
empty, rain fell in torrents, and the lights
glimmered on the surface of the pools. The
hours passed. Harriet sat motionless, except
that once or twice she pressed her hands upon
her temples. Once she murmured, half audibly:

"I wonder if I am going mad?"

At eleven o'clock Routh came home. He
opened the door of the room in which Harriet
was sitting, came in, and leaned against the
wall, without speaking. In quick, instinctive
alarm, she went to the table in the corner,
took up a candle, and held it towards his
face. He was quite pale, his eyes were glassy,
his hair was disordered. In a moment Harriet
saw, and saw for the first time in her life, that
he was intoxicated.

SUPERSTITION DIES HARD.

Two miles from a populous borough town,
which is within an hour's railway journey from
London, there commences a boggy district of
common-land known as North-street. Scattered
about this tract of country are old dwellings
with frameworks built of massive beams of oak,
with entrances so low that you must stoop on
passing through them, or pay the penalty of a
damaged head-gear. These houses are
surrounded by small patches of cultivated land,
forming islands in a dreary desert of pool, bog,
and stunted herbage. The curate of the parish,
whose stipend is too small to enable him to
keep a horse, does not favour these outlying
parishioners with his presence oftener than he
can help. It thus comes to pass that the parish
doctor is almost the only one out of their
immediate sphere who is brought into contact with
them. The writer is that parish doctor.

In one of the oldest and most isolated of the
North-street cottages there lived, until a few
months ago, a tall thin gaunt old woman with
piercing black eyes, with rather a stern than a
malignant expression of countenance. This
woman's name was Redburn— "Old Mother
Redburn, the witch."

At what period of her life she commenced her
career of witchcraft it is impossible to say;
certain it is that for many years past she was
accredited with all the recognised powers of
curse and spell and evil eye. She has bewitched
pigs, and they have refused to fatten; she has
bewitched cows, and they have become dry or
have died; children under her baneful influence
have wasted away to mere skeletons; young
women have gone into decline; young men have
been lamed; old men and women have become
blind, deaf, bedridden, palsied, a prey to every
human woe, all owing— in the popular belief —
to the ill-will of  " Old Mother Redburn." She
had cast an evil eye upon a bedstead upon
which ever afterwards no one could sleep with
rest. Cabbages, corn, turnips, and potatoes have
all in their turn withered and rotted before her
curse. It was even insinuated that the cattle
plague, which in this district was particularly
fatal, was owing to the incantations of " Mother
Redburn." So potent was the effect of her spell
(in the belief of the cottagers) that it could be
transmitted from an animal to a human being, or
even from an inanimate to an animated object.
Thus a cow that was bewitched by "Mother
Redburn" runs at a child, and immediately the
child is bewitched also. People who have slept
upon a bewitched bedstead become themselves
bewitched.

The first time I was brought face to face
with this deeply rooted belief was during
my first visit to old Mrs. Smith. I was quite
new to the district then, and pursued my
investigations into the causes of her disease
according to the ordinary professional rules. Mrs.
Smith was, I found, undoubtedly blind. She
had cataract in both eyes; she was also deaf and
bedridden. I could not quite satisfy myself
why she was bedridden; but I was told she had
kept her bed for several years, and could not by
any means sit up, much less stand. Several
old women of forbidding aspect sat round the
room and shook their heads with such scorn
at all my attempts to ascertain the origin
of the disease from natural causes, that at last
I asked them what they thought of the matter.

"Ah! we all think that Mother Redburn has
most to say to it." This was given with an
air of mystery, and with a manner which said
plainly enough that, if all my doubts were not
cleared up now, they ought to be.

I visited Mrs. Smith from time to time, and
always found her in much the same condition as
on my first introduction to her. About six
months ago, her husband, a fine old man who
formerly served in the army, came to me and
requested me to give him a certificate for the
relieving-officer, to the effect that his wife was
in a fit state to be removed to a parish on the
other side of London. On inquiring into the
reasons for this projected departure from the
neighbourhood in which they had lived so long,
there was so much beating about the bush in
his replies, that the thought suddenly struck me,
Here is Old Mother Redburn again."

I pressed my inquiries.

"Well, sir," he admitted at last, " the fact is,
there's a many about us as thinks my missis
will never get no better while she is where she