In searching again Lord Kilkerran’s Session Papers in the Advocates’ Library, I observed a strange remark written on the margin of one of them--“Beware of pinched Tom”--the meaning of which I was at a loss to find. His lordship was known to be a very grave man, as well as an excellent lawyer, and all so unlike the Newtons and Harmands, who made the blind Lady Justice laugh by the antics of that other lady sung by Beranger--Dame Folly--that I was put to my wit’s end, although I admit that, by a reference to a part of the printed Session Papers opposite to which the remark was made, I thought I could catch a glimmering of his lordship’s intention. The law case occupying the papers comprehended a question of disputed succession, and that question involved the application of a curious law in Scotland, which still remains. I believe we borrowed it from that great repertory from which our forefathers took so much wisdom--the Roman code; but be that as it may, (and it’s no great matter in so far as regards my story,) certain it is that it is a part of our jurisprudence, that where a marriage is dissolved by the death of the wife within a year and a day of the celebration thereof, without leaving a living child, the tocher goes back to the wife’s friends. Of course nothing is more untrue than that bit of connubial wit: that while we hold, according to the Bible, that a man and his wife are _one_, we also very sensibly hold that the husband is _that one_. Then the child behoves to be a living child; but what constituted a living child often turned out to be as difficult a question as what constitutes a new birth of a living Christian, according to our good old sturdy Calvinism; for as all doctors know that a child will, on coming into the world, give a breath or two with a shiver, and then go off like a candle not properly lighted, it became a question whether, in such a case, the child could be said to have lived. Sometimes, too, the living symptom is less doubtful, as in the case, also very common, where the little stranger gives a tiny scream, the consequence of the filling of the lungs by the rushing in of the air, and having experienced a touch of the evils of life, makes up its mind to be off as quickly as possible from a wicked world. Now this last symptom our Scotch law accepts as the only evidence which can be received that the child had within it a living-spirit, or, as we call it, an immortal soul. It would be of no importance that it opened and shut its eyes, moved its hands, or kicked or sprawled in any way you please; all this is nothing but infantine pantomime, and the worst pantomime, too, that it has no possible meaning that any rational person could understand, and so, therefore, it goes for nothing. In short, our law holds that, unless “baby squeak,” there is no evidence that baby ever lived. Nor is any distinction made between the male and the female, although we know so well that the latter is much more