I may as well write it as I read, thus; “I heard such a pretty story last night of something that happened at a school in Germany, not long since. It was the custom of one of the masters to go round every night to the dormitories to see that the boys were asleep, all right. One night he was astonished to see a lady go up to one of the boys, stoop over him and kiss him, and then vanish. Next morning, news came that the mother of that particular boy had died at the time. Isn’t it lovely? Even A. believes that.” Yes; and A. does wisely; and so may B., and C.: but yet I should much like to know what particular boy, in what particular school in Germany. Nevertheless, the story has more value for me because it is written to me by a person who herself saw the shade—or rather light—of her sister, at the time of that sister’s death on the other side of the world; being a member of that branch of my family in which some gift of the Scottish second sight remains, inherited by my maternal grandmother, who ran away with my paternal grandfather when she was not quite sixteen; and my aunt Jessie, (my father’s only sister,) was born a year afterwards; a few weeks after which event, my grandmother, not yet seventeen, was surprised, (by a friend who came into her room unannounced,) dancing a threesome reel, with two chairs for her partners, she having found at the moment no other way of adequately expressing the pleasure she took in this mortal life, and its gifts, and promises. The latter failed somewhat afterwards; and my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland way; utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan way, and very submissive to Fates mostly unkind, married, or was married to—I never could make out exactly which, or why,—a somewhat rough tanner, with a fairly good business, in the good town of Perth; and, when I was old enough to be taken first to visit them, as aforesaid, my aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a good square-built gray stone house at the ‘Bridge-End’ of Perth, some fifty yards north of the bridge; their garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which eddied, three or four feet deep of sombre crystal, round the steps where the servants dipped their pails.