In detailing the curious circumstances of the following story, I am again only reporting a real law case to be found in the Court of Session Records, the turning-point of which was as invisible to the judges as to the parties themselves--that is, until the end came; a circumstance again which made the case a kind of developed romance. But as an end implies a beginning, and the one is certainly as necessary as the other, we request you to accompany us--taking care of your feet--up the narrow spiral staircase of a tenement called Corbet’s Land, in the same old town where so many wonderful things in the complicated drama--or dream, if you are a Marphurius--of human life have occurred. Up which spiral stair having got by the help of our hands, almost as indispensable as that of the feet--we find ourselves in a little human dovecot of two small rooms, occupied by two persons not unlike, in many respects, two doves--Widow Craig and her daughter, called May, euphuised by the Scotch into Mysie. The chief respects in which they might be likened, without much stress, to the harmless creatures we have mentioned, were their love for each other, together with their total inoffensiveness as regarded the outside world; and we are delighted to say this, for we see so many of the multitudinous sides of human nature dark and depraved, that we are apt to think there is no bright side at all. Nor shall we let slip the opportunity of saying, at the risk of being considered very simple, that of all the gifts of felicity bestowed, as the Pagan Homer tells, upon mankind by the gods, no one is so perfect and beautiful as the love that exists between a good mother and a good daughter.