but thee shouldst have considered better than
to have attempted anything against thy
father; thee shouldst have considered I was
thy own father."

"Sir," she said, "as to your illness, I am
entirely innocent."

One of the servants then reminded her of
the known facts. Miss Blandy replied, "I
have put powder into tea, I have put powder
into water-gruel; and, if you are injured, I
am entirely innocent, for it was given me
with another intent."

Her father firmly believed that. He spoke
of her only as the poor love-sick girl, upon
whose simplicity Cranstoun had practised.
"O, such a villain!" he said, as he turned in
his bed. "Come to my house, eat of the best
and drink of the best my house could afford,
to take away my life and ruin my daughter."
But in his last words to his child, after blessing
her, there was a strange mingling of the
lawyer with the father: "Do, my dear, go out
of my room; say no more, lest thou shouldst
say anything to thy own prejudice."

The girl was taken back to prison in her
chamber. She pleaded in vain. She asked
afterwards for leave only to be against her
father's door when he was dying. She was a
monster in the eyes of all about her, and as
such she was treated. On the night of her
father's death, she made, to two servants, wild
proposals of flight. At the time of the
autopsy, she being left with open doors,
she said, in the defence she was obliged to
make for herself upon her trial,—"I ran out
of the house,—"out of the house and over
the bridge, and had nothing on but an half
sack and petticoat without a hoop; my
petticoats hanging about me, the mob gathered
about me. Was this a condition, my lords, to
make my escape in? A good woman beyond
the bridge, seeing me in this distress, desired
me to walk in till the mob was dispersed."
There she was taken, and brought back to
durance. The good woman so mentioned,
being examined, said that when she called
Mary Blandy in to save her from the mob,
"she was walking as softly as foot could be
laid to the ground; it had not the least
appearance of her going to make her escape."

For this attempt to escape, such as it was,
the prisoner was made to wear irons in gaol.
Outside the gaol doors, horrible stories—
afterwards confessed to be false—were told about
her. She was found guilty of murder at her
trial, but conducted herself with so much
decorum that the prejudice of many persons
was diminished. Afterwards, while under
sentence, her behaviour in prison was said to
be unimpeachable. She was content to suffer
for having destroyed her father; but to the
last, with an appearance of true sincerity,
declared that she had been duped by Cranstoun,
and persisted in that account of the crime,
which she confirmed with an awful adjuration.
Her last words were: "May I not
meet with eternal salvation, nor be acquitted
by Almighty God, in whose awful presence
I am instantly to appear, if the whole of what
I have here asserted be not true."

There are more details in this case than
we have given here; but we have represented
fairly the degree and nature of its difficulty.
Cranstoun fled the country, and suffered at
the hands of human justice no punishment
worse than outlawry.

SUBURBAN BELGIUM.

THE Society of the True Friends of the
Belgian Lion have retired from their place of
rendezvous, opposite my window, and I can
write in peace. They were pleasant fellows,
very!—friends, in fact, of whose attachment
any lion—Belgian, or otherwise—might
feel proud; but, for my own part, I found
a little of them go a remarkably long way.
Joining hands in a circle, and performing a
series of maniacal jumps, to the time of a
drum and a pair of cymbals in the centre
(played by a deaf professor, who has registered
a vow to hear the sound of his own
instruments once, before he dies), is good
fun, I grant you,—more especially when you
happen to be forty in number, and have
been dining together in a country where
strong beer is about twopence a gallon. And
then—if you all happen to possess tolerably
strong lungs, and know the words of a
patriotic chorus in the Flemish tongue, with
a tune apiece to roar it to—why, the excitement
of the thing is naturally enhanced.
Towards the end of an entertainment organised
on these principles—when every force is
brought to unite in a general crescendo
movement—when the time goes quicker, the
drummer thumps harder; the legs leap
higher; the voices roar louder, till organisation
collapses, and the whole resolves itself
into a pandemoniac chaos of shrieks, yells,
bangs, thumps and tumbles. I know of no
national amusement more thrillingly delightful
in its way. Only it is rather trying to a
nervous literary gentleman sitting at an
opposite window, and who would like to finish an
article in time for the post. Beyond this, I
have no fault to find with it whatever.

They have gone, roaring and staggering,
arm-in-arm, down the clean Flemish street
which tries so hard to look as if it belonged
to the town; but which breaks down utterly
into calm, dark-green, poplar-planted, sandy-
ribbed, Dutch country, not two hundred
yards from my window. Their stentorian,
Poly-tuned chorus is still audible, and will
be, long after I shall have lost sight of their
flat caps and gloomy funeral blouses. Nay,
after the very newspaper crown, with which
they have invested their deaf drummer, and
even the top of their drunken, lurching,
stumbling, tricolor standard, shall have
faded from my horizon. Bless them, for honest,
manly, noisy, disreputable, boozy, Teuton
giants, as they are!