And thus progressed to a termination a scene perhaps more extraordinary than ever entered into the head of a writer of natural things and events not beyond the sphere of the probable. Nor did what afterwards took place fall short of the intentions of a man whose intense yearnings to make up for what had been lost led him into the extravagance of a vain fancy. He next day took a great house and forthwith furnished it in proportion to his wealth. He hired servants in accordance, and made all the necessary arrangements for the marriage. Time which had been so cruel to him and his sacred Mary was put under the obligation of retribution. John Gilmour, Mrs Paterson, Mrs Galloway, and Helen Kemp were those, and those alone, privileged to witness the ceremony. We would not like to describe how they were decked out, nor shall we try to describe the ceremony itself. But vain are the aspirations of man when he tries to cope with the Fates! The changed fortune was too much for the frail and wasted bride to bear. She swooned at the conclusion of the ceremony, and was put into a silk-curtained bed. Even the first glimpse of grandeur was too much for the spirit whose sigh was vanity, all is vanity, and, with the words on her lips, “A life’s love lost,” she died. [Illustration] [Illustration] The Story of the Merrillygoes. The world has been compared to many things,--a playhouse, a madhouse, a penitentiary, a caravanserai, and so forth; but I think a show-box wherein all, including man, is turned by machinery, is better than any of them. And every one looks through his own little round hole at all the rest, he being both object and subject. How the scenes shift too! the belief of one age being the laughing-stock of the next. Witches and brownies and fairies and ghosts and bogles have lost their quiddity, and given birth to quips and laughs; but I have here, as a simple storyteller, to do with one example of these vanished beliefs, what was in folk-lore called the “Merrillygoes,” sometimes in the old Scotch dictionaries spelled “Mirrligoes.” It was a supposed affection of the eyes, in which the victim or patient, as you suppose the visitation brought on by natural or supernatural powers, fancied he saw men and women and inanimate things which were not at the time before him. I think the affection was different from the “glamour” which was generally attributed to the wrath of fairies; and both indeed might, after all, be resolved into the pseudoblepsy of the old, and the monomania of the new nosologies. But dismissing all learning--which, however potent to puff up man’s pride, and then prick the bladder of his conceit, has no concern with a story--I at once introduce to you Mr David Tweedie. He was one of those Davids who, for some Scotch reason, are called Dauvit; and, like other simple men, he had a wife, whose name, I think, was Semple, Robina Semple, certainly not Simple. These worthies figured in Berenger’s Close of Edinburgh some time about the