A speech followed by the inevitable laugh of a curious audience, and the better received that the people had always a satirical feeling against the fifteen wise wigs. Nor was this late testimony too late: Mrs Glennie was subsequently sworn, and the judgment went for Sarah. It turned out that Mrs Glennie had been absent for a time from Scotland, and, having, upon visiting Edinburgh, heard of the famous trial, made it a point to be present. Nay, there was a little retribution in the affair, for Lady Gorthley knew she was alive, and had reported her death to serve her own ends. [Illustration] [Illustration] The Story of the Chalk Line. For the truth of the story I am now to relate I have the word of a godly minister of the Church of Scotland, whose father had been in the house in Burnet’s Close, and had seen the two females and examined “the chalk line” in the middle of the floor. I do not say this to conciliate your belief; for perhaps if this were my object, I should be nearer the attainment of it by asserting, as Mr Thackeray used to do when he wanted his readers to believe him, that there is not a word of truth in the whole affair. There is a certain species of fish in the Ganges which is never happy but when it is pushing up against the stream; and people, as civilisation goes on, find themselves so often cheated, that they go by contraries, just as the old sorcerers divined by reading backwards. But surely in this age of subtleties it is a pleasant thing to think that you are so much the object of an author’s care as that he would not only save you from thinking, but think for you; and so I proceed to tell you of the personages in Burnet’s Close, leading from the High Street to the Cowgate. In a room of the second flat of the third tall tenement on your left hand as you descend lived Martha and Mary Jopp. They were, so far as I have been able to discover, the daughters of a writer of the name of Peter Jopp. You cannot be wrong in supposing that they had been once young, though, in regard to the aged, this is not always conceded by those who are buoyant with the spirit of youth. Yes, these aged maidens had not only been once young, they had been very fair and very comely. They had passed through the spring and summer flowers without treading upon the speckled serpent of the same colour. They had heard the song of love where there was no risk of the deceptions of the siren. They had been tempted; but they had resisted the temptation of some who could well have returned their affection. Nor was this the result of any want of natural sensibility; if it was not that they had too much of that quality, which, if it is the source of pleasure, is also that of pain--perhaps more of the latter than the former, though we dare not say so in this our time of angelic perfection.