The smith brought his poor white Rose
home on the third anniversary of their
marriage: and, the next day, she was interred, with
all the rites of the church, amidst the too
late repentance of her persecutors. Master
Simon and Richard stood by the grave in
angry sorrow, and directly opposite them,
with her wicked eyes, fixed on the smith's
face, was Mistress Gilbert. As he was
moving away, at last their glances met; the
waiting-woman laughed triumphantly, and
pointed downwards at the coffin with a
significant air. Richard looked at her steadily
for a moment, and then said in a deep,
concentrated tone, which the hearers recalled
afterwards as a tone of prophecy. "Ay,
Mistress Gilbert, there lies the body of my
poor Rose that you hated, and her spirit is
safe in Heaven. You may laugh now, but you
shall not laugh long. The day is near when
your body shall raise a lowe that shall be
seen from Whistlebank to Carnridge, and
your spirit shall skirl to be heard from
Hecklestone for three miles round."
Mistress Gilbert only laughed the louder as she
marched away.

But Richard Nicholl's words came true.

The Hecklestone was a tall block of
granite, set up in Hambledon park, on an
elevation about a hundred yards from the
house. So long as it remained, there were
two marks upon the top, which tradition
said were made by the burning hands of
Mistress Gilbert; she was set on fire
accidentally, and, flying from the house, in her
agony she ran up to Hecklestone, screaming,
and clung to it, blazing all over, until
the light was seen "from Whistlebank to
Carnridge, and her cries were heard for
three miles round." People ran to her help,
but the story goes that the fire resisted every
effort to put it out. Mistress Gilbert was
burnt to ashes; and, wherever the wind
scattered them, says tradition, the ground was
for ever after barren.

REALLY DANGEROUS CLASSES.

THERE are two classes of men eternally at
war with society—criminals and careless
people; but, while the law has amply
provided for the punishment of the first, it finds
a difficulty in dealing out retributive justice
for the second. A velvet-footed, light-
fingered lad approaches me stealthily from
behind, and without causing me the slightest
bodily pain, or a moment's mental uneasiness,
he abstracts from my pocket a common
handkerchief of a value ranging between eighteen-
pence and two-and-sixpence, and the sentence
of the court is, that he be imprisoned, with
hard labour, for the period of six calendar
months.

A brawny, gaping, agricultural giant from
the country, who supposes that the highly
difficult feat of walking the London streets
can be performed at once without training
or experience, may run against me with the
force of a battering ram; may grind to
destruction one, if not both, of my favourite
patent boots; may injure for months the
agonising corns that are covered by the smiling,
deceitful, faces of those boots; may
damage my slender Geneva watch beyond the
skill of the cleverest refugee to repair; may
raise into mountainous heaps the smooth,
flat surface of my irreproachable Corazza
shirt; may even seriously disfigure my faultless,
aquiline nose; yet all this, according to
the absurd usage of society, is to be balanced
by the empty formulary "I beg your pardon,"
and there is to be no custody, no court, no
judge, no jury, no sentence.

An old woman with imperfect eyesight,
who will not pay for a servant to attend
upon her, or a young lady whose passion for
romantic literature is greater than her
prudence, may, by the decree of a malicious fate,
be found in the position of my next-door
neighbour; and, because the physical weakness
of the first, or the mental novel-reading-
in-bed weakness of the second, causes the
chamber-curtains to be set on fire, I am
condemned at an uncertain time to walk the
night along the giddy parapet, like Amina, in
the opera; before the gaping eyes of an
assembled multitude; dressed in nothing
worth mentioning, except a pair of flannel
drawers, with a child in one arm and a
French clock in the other. I am burnt out
of my favourite dwelling, and my easy-chair,
my household gods, are reduced to charcoal
and ashes; I am transferred for many weeks
to hastily chosen and inconvenient lodgings;
I have to prepare a long detailed report
to obtain compensation from a sulky fire-
office; and the law, under all these injuries
affords me neither reward nor condolence.
But if I am aroused by an attempted
burglary in the dead of night, and I go down
to my carefully-prepared ambush to find a
miserable member of the dangerous classes
fixed by my artful and penetrating spikes,
and worried by my faithful and powerful
mastiff, I have only to spend an hour entering
the charge with an energetic policeman
and an affable inspector, and I am then
allowed to retire to my comfortable bed to
dream of the criminal offender who has
injured himself more than he has injured
me, and the weapons which the law has
placed in my hands wherewith to punish
him.

A drover of imperfect humanity—whose
desire to govern the unruly bullock is not
tempered by a regard for the sufferings of the
animal, or a calculation of the effect of
overdriving upon the quality of the meat—may,
by an intemperate indulgence in the illegal
stimulus of a tenpenny nail at the end of his
stick, goad a harmless beast, to the condition,
of an infuriated monster that nothing but
the pole-axe will quell. This excited animal,
after it has frightened my wife and her nurse-