"But it was my fault," replied Ellinor, pleading
against the condemnation.

Dixon looked at her pretty sharply from under
his ragged bushy eyebrows.

"He had been giving me a lecture, and saying
I did not do what his sisters did— just as if I
were to be always trying to be like somebody
else— and I was cross, and ran away."

"Then it was Missy who would not say goodby.
That was not manners in Missy."

"But, Dixon, I don't like being lectured!"

"I reckon you don't get much of it. But,
indeed, my pretty, I dare say Mr. Corbet was in
the right; for, you see, master is busy, and Miss
Monro is so dreadful learned, and your poor
mother is dead and gone, and you have no one
to teach you how young ladies go on; and by all
accounts Mr. Corbet comes of a good family.
I've heerd say his father had the best stud-farm
in all Shropshire, and spared no money upon it;
and the young ladies his sisters will have been
taught the best of manners; it might be well for
my pretty to hear how they go on."

"You dear old Dixon you don't know anything
about my lecture, and I am not going to
tell you. Only I dare say Mr. Corbet might be
a little bit right, though I am sure he was a
great deal wrong."

"But you'll not go on a fretting—- you won't
now, there's a good young lady — for master won't
like it, and it will make him uneasy, and he's
enough of trouble without your red eyes, bless
them."

"Trouble— papa, trouble! Oh, Dixon! what
do you mean?" exclaimed Ellinor, her face
taking all a woman's intensity of expression in a
minute.

"Nay, I know nought," said Dixon, evasively.
"Only that Dunster fellow is not to my mind,
and I think he potters the master sadly with his
fid-fad ways."

"I hate Mr. Dunster!" said Ellinor, vehemently.
"I won't speak a word to him the next
time he comes to dine with papa."

"Missy will do what papa likes best," said
Dixon, admonishingly; and with this the "pair
of friends" parted.

HOME-OFFICE INSPIRATION.

In this journal very recently, some hints were
timorously hazarded, as to whether it would not
be advisable, when the Perfection of Human
Reason arrests, tries, and convicts an accused,
to follow the unnatural and illegal course of
hearing some story or explanation from the
mouth of the party subject to these proceedings.
A recent Scotch trial — conducted according to
all the antique freaks and extravagances of
Scotch procedure — has borne fruit in a very
surprising direction, mainly owing to an eccentric
perversion of what is in itself a wholesome
principle. There is, indeed, a natural diffidence
in laying rude hands on the sacred person of
what has been held out to us as the legal Goddess
of Reason. But this divinity has of late
suffered so many startling changes, and endured
such wholesale amputation of portions of her
sacred person, that reverent but doubting
followers may now draw near and take their part
in the sacrifices. When, therefore, the wretched
Maclachlan is suffered by the effete forms of her
country to make her wild and artful statement—
exempt from the necessary test with which such
statement should be accompanied, or dismissed
as worthless; and when this piece of evidence
has materially influenced her fate, it is high
time that so loose a screw in the Perfection of
Human Wisdom should be drawn out or tightened,
and that the system with all its flaws or
perfections be tested, like an Armstrong or Whitworth
gun. The shipwreck of this recent trial
has sent again to the surface, the old long-mooted
questions of the advisability of admitting the
testimony of criminals in their own cases; and of
regulating their final destiny of life or death — not
by the imperfect and unskilled judgment of a
secretary of state, but by the science and
professional wisdom of the judges of the country
formed into a Court of Criminal Appeal.

Within a very few years there have been
three notorious instances of the exercise of this
secretarial prerogative, in, curious to say, each
of the nationalities which compose the British
Isles. The series commenced in Ireland, some
ten or twelve years ago, when a gentleman of
station and respectability ferried his wife— a
beautiful and interesting woman— across to
a rude and lonely headland near Dublin, known
picturesquely as Ireland's Eye, and there
mysteriously murdered her. The trial of Kirwan
is well known and recollected as a Cause
Célèbre. He was hunted to conviction through
all the perplexing yet delightful subtleties of
circumstantial evidence, and, when removed to
the condemned felons' cell with sentence of
death hanging over his head, a tribe of new
inquirers flew down into the arena of newspaper
columns, and for weeks tried the prisoner over
again. Critics, lay and professional, became
Ancient Mariners for the time, and held editors
by the button-hole, while they expanded their
speculations into whole and half-columns of
"your valuable space." The evidence was
stigmatised and applauded; and above all, the
jury's verdict was denounced in the most
unmeasured and contemptuous language. And
then began to be agitated the more serious
question how far it was proper that the life
of a fellow-creature should be made to hang
upon this final and alterable verdict of twelve
men, who might be swayed by artful advocacy
and blind prejudices, and the hundred-and-
one chances which may endanger justice in
the tortuous progress of a trial by jury. And
then it began to be doubted whether that
portion of the Perfection of Human Wisdom,
which made that united voice of "the twelve
intelligent men" a sacred and irrevocable thing,
not to be canvassed or tampered with by the
profane fingers of revision, was not, after all, a
questionable blessing. Pressed by the storms