inclined to make a noise than the other, were it for nothing else than to exhibit a first attempt to do that at which the sex are so good when they grow up and get husbands. To bring back the reader to Lord Kilkerran’s remark--“Beware of Pinched Tom”--the case to which the note applied comprehended the question whether the child had been heard to cry, and though the connexion might be merely imaginary on my part, I recollected in the instant having heard the story I now relate of Mr Thomas Whitelaw, a merchant burgess of Edinburgh, who figured somewhere between the middle and the end of last century, and took for wife a certain Janet Monypenny. In which union “the sufficient reason” which always exists, though we do not always know it, was on the part of the said Thomas the certainty that Janet’s name (defying Shakespeare’s question) was a real designative of a quality, that being that she possessed, in her own right, not merely many a penny, but so many thousand pennies, that they amounted to somewhere about two thousand merks, a large sum in those olden days. And this money was perhaps the more valuable, that the heiress had an unfortunate right by inheritance to consumption, whereby she ran a risk of being taken away, leaving her money unconsumed in the hands of her husband; an event, this latter, which our merchant burgess could certainly have turned to more certain account if he had provided against the law we have mentioned by entering into an antenuptial contract of marriage, wherein it might have been set forth that, though the marriage should be dissolved by the death of the wife before “year and day,” without a living child being born thereof, yet the husband’s right to the tocher would remain. But then Burgess Thomas did not know of any such law, while Mr George Monypenny, the brother of Mrs Janet, knew it perfectly, the more by token that he was a writer, that is, a legal practitioner, at the Luckenbooths. And though Mr George might have made a few pennies by writing out the contract, he never hinted to his intended brother-in-law of the propriety of any such act, because he knew that he had a chance of coming to more pennies, by the death of his sister, within the year and the day.