shoot against the other glances of triumph as she figured herself in heaven looking down upon the torments of her sister in hell. And all this while neither could have with her own hands inflicted the scratch of a pin upon the body of the other. It was enough that each could lacerate the feelings of the other as a vent to the exasperation which embittered her own heart. Still more remarkable, there were none of these reconciliations that among relations often make amends for strife, and maintain the equipoise so insisted upon by nature. We all know how these ameliorations work in the married life and among lovers. In these cases the anger seems to become the fuel of love. Not so with our sisters. The worm was a never-dying one. But even in this desperate case there was not wanting evidence of nature’s efforts towards an amelioration. It was true they could not separate; they were objects necessary to each other; nay, even if Mr Ross, who witnessed the working of the domestic evil, had contrived to get them into separate rooms--a proposal which was indeed made, and morbidly resisted--they would have pursued each other in imagination with perhaps even more misery than that which they inflicted on each other. At length they came to a scheme of their own, so peculiar that it has formed the incident of that story which has made it live in Edinburgh through many years, and even to this day. The plan was, that they should draw in the middle of the floor a distinct line of chalk, which should be a boundary between them, over which neither the one nor the other would ever set her foot. To make this plan workable, it was necessary that the two ends of the room should be each self-contained as regarded the necessary articles of household plenishing; and this, by the aid of Mr Ross and Peggy Fergusson, was duly accomplished. One of these articles was a big ha’ Bible for Martha, to stand against that retained by Mary--in explanation of which I may inform the English reader that the old Calvinists had nearly as much faith in the size of their Bibles as in their contents. Nor was the strength of their faith altogether irrespective of the kind of cover, and the manner in which it was clasped. There was a great virtue in good strong calfskin--sometimes with the rough hair upon it; and if the clasps were of silver or gold, the volume had a peculiar merit. It was necessary, therefore, that Martha’s Bible should be as big as Mary’s; and the latter having been adorned by old Peter Jopp with silver clasps, so the former was equally orthodox in this respect.