Charles the First; when, although marriage
of first cousins was legal, Alexander Blair,
a tailor in Currie, was beheaded for marrying
his first wife's half-brother's daughter. On
the same day another man proved guilty of
bigamy, received no worse sentence than
exile.

It was also somewhat hard upon a person
who was "both man and woman, a thing not
ordinar in this kingdom," that he-and-she
should be hung for such irregularities
as that "his custom was always to go in a
woman's habit."  "When opened by certain
doctors and apothecaries, he was found to be
two every way, having two hearts, two livers,
two every inward thing." On the same day
an old man was burnt for warlockry, upon
his own confession, and desire to be burnt
for the safety of his soul.

Our last citation we give as it stands upon
one of the later pages of the annals. It
belongs to the reign of Charles the Second,
and the date is October, sixteen hundred
and seventy-eight: "At this time, eighty
persons were detained in prison in
Edinburgh,on account of matters of religion,
waiting till they should be transported
as slaves to Barbadoes.

"In connection with this distressing fact
may be placed one of a different complexion,
which Fountainhill states elsewhere. The
magistrates, he tells us, were sensible of the
inadequacy of their old Tolbooth for the
purposes of justice in those days of pious
zeal. Consequently, one Thomas Moodie
leaving them twenty thousand merks to build
a church, they declaring 'they have no use
for a church'—offered to build with the
money a new Tolbooth, above the west port,
'and to put Thomas Moodie's name and
arms thereon!'

"It really appears that our ancestors
looked upon the building of a gaol as a public
act of some dignity and importance. Patriæ
et posteris (for our country and posterity)
is the self-complacent inscription on the front
of the Canongate Tolbooth."

The Scottish Church was, in those days, a
prison. The bond of Christian brotherhood
differed but little from the fetters of the
Tolbooth. A bequest for a gaol might
reasonably have been spent in the erection of
a church, and it was not less reasonable, as
the word then went in Scotland, that when
Thomas Moodie bequeathed money for the
building of a church, the Edinburgh corporation,
in a candid humour, gave it the form of a gaol.

These domestic annals are full of romantic
pictures of Scottish life, which startle an
Englishman familiar with the social state of
his own nation during the contemporary
period, by their dark shadows. Mr. Robert
Chambers has most judiciously refrained
from any tampering with the originals:  he
presents them to us without any re-touchings
of his own; and with the skilful arrangement
of a sound and appreciative historian,
and a man who is, in all things, an honour to
Scotland.

MY LADY LUDLOW

CHAPTER THE SECOND

BEFORE I tell you about Mr. Gray, I think
I ought to make you understand something
more of what we did all day long at Hanbury
Court. There were five of us at the time of
which I am speaking, all young women of
good descent, and allied (however distantly)
to people of rank. When we were not with
my lady, Mrs. Medlicott looked after us; a
gentle little woman, who had been companion
to my lady for many years, and was indeed,
I have been told, some kind of relation to
her. Mrs. Medlicott's parents had lived in
Germany, and the consequence was, she spoke
English with a very foreign accent. Another
consequence was, that she excelled in all
manner of needlework, such as is not known
even by name in these days. She could
darn either lace, table-linen, India muslin,
or stockings, so that no one could tell where
the hole or rent had been. Though a good
Protestant, and never missing Guy Faux
day at church, she was as skilful at fine work
as any nun in a Papist convent. She would
take a piece of French cambric, and by drawing
out some threads, and working in others,
it became delicate lace in a very few hours.
She did the same by Hollands cloth, and
made coarse strong lace, with which all my
lady's napkins and table-linen were trimmed.
We worked under her during a great part
of the day, either in the still-room, or at our
sewing in a chamber that opened out of the
great hall. My lady despised every kind of
work that would now be called Fancywork.
She considered that the use of
coloured threads or worsted was only fit to
amuse children; but that grown women
ought not to be taken with mere blues and
reds, but to restrict their pleasure in sewing
to making small and delicate stitches. She
would speak of the old tapestry in the hall
as the work of her ancestresses, who lived
before the Reformation, and were
consequently unacquainted with pure and simple
tastes in work, as well as in religion. Nor
would my lady sanction the fashion of the
day, which, at the beginning of this century,
made all the fine ladies take to making shoes.
She said that such work was a consequence
of the French Revolution, which had done
much to annihilate all distinctions of rank
and class, and hence it was, that she saw
young ladies of birth and breeding handling
lasts, and awls, and dirty cobbler's-wax, like
shoe-makers' daughters.

Very frequently one of us would be
summoned to my lady to read aloud to her,
where she sate in her small withdrawing-
room, some improving book. It was
generally Mr. Addison's "Spectator"; but one