The Burns Monument is a circular edifice with columns and a cupola. It has all the outward semblance of a tomb, so that one is rather startled to find it tenanted by a canny Scot--a live one--who presides with becomingly sepulchral gravity over a twopenny show of miscellaneous trumpery connected with Robert Burns. Everywhere in old Edinburgh we have seen going on the inevitable struggle between utility and sentiment: at Burns's Monument it ceases, and we conclude our ramble at this point, where the sentimentalist and the utilitarian shake hands, the former deeply sympathizing with the sentiment which led to the building of the monument, while the latter fondly admires the ingenuity which can turn even a cenotaph to account. ALFRED S. GIBBS. FOOTNOTES: [A] Baloo is a lullaby, supposed to be from the French _Bas, la le loup_--"Lie still, the wolf is coming." [B] The "dear deceiver" was said to have been her cousin, the Hon. Alexander Erskine, brother to the earl of Mar. He came to a violent death, although not in the manner suggested in the ballad. While stationed at Dunglass Castle, engaged in collecting levies for the army of the Covenanters, an angry page thrust a red-hot poker into the powder-magazine, and blew him up with a number of others, so that there was "never bone nor hyre seen of them again." A LAW UNTO HERSELF. CHAPTER I. On a raw, cloudy afternoon in early spring a few years ago a family-carriage was driven slowly down a lonely road in one of the outlying suburbs of Philadelphia, stopping at last in front of an apparently vacant house. This house was built of gray stone, and stood back from the road, surrounded by a few sombre pines and much rank shrubbery: shrubbery and trees, and the house itself, had long been abandoned to decay. "Heah am de place, sah," said the footman, opening the carriage-door.