known what it is to eat heartily, or to be covered from the piercing wind, for weeks and months. Shrink not from me. Wretched as I seem, I am still your husband. Nothing on earth can break that tie. Meat, I say—drink—I am in my own house, and will be obeyed. For you, gentles, get you gone; your company is not now agreeable.” The company dispersed without farther ceremony, leaving the unhappy woman alone with her husband. Next day, the stranger appeared abroad in a decent suit of clothes, and Mrs Dempster seemed to have recovered a little of her equanimity. Every sacrifice, however, which she could make for this wretch, was in vain, or only encouraged him to demand greater indulgences. An unlimited supply of liquor in his own house would not satisfy him. He required large sums wherewith to treat all the _canaille_ of the town. Entreaties, indulgences, every thing that could be devised to gratify him, were unavailing to impress him with a sense of his wife’s situation. He intruded his unhallowed front into her school, and insulted her before her pupils. Those who laughed at his antics he would seize by the shoulders, and turn out of doors. He had also a most perverse desire of pushing himself into her presence, whenever he thought she was conversing with any of her employers, before whom an observance of propriety and decorum was most particularly necessary. Indeed, he just delighted to do exactly what his wife wished him not to do, the grand object of his low mind being to show how much he had her comfort and welfare in his power. At length, with every feeling of respect for Mrs Dempster, her employers, the magistrates, found it necessary to inform her, that they could not permit her to retain the school any longer under such circumstances, as it was threatened with utter annihilation by the gradual diminution of the number of pupils. She proposed to her husband to allow him regularly the full half of her earnings, if he would only stay in some other place, and never again intrude upon her. But he scorned to be bought off, as he said. He insisted rather upon her giving up the school, and accompanying him to Edinburgh, where, with the little sum she had saved, and what besides they could raise by the sale of her superfluous furniture, he would enter into business on his own account, and she should never again be obliged to work for either herself or for him. The poor woman had no alternative. She was compelled to abandon the scene, where for so many years she had enjoyed the comforts of life and the respect of society, in order to be dragged at the chariot wheels, or rather at the cart’s tail, of her husband’s vices and fortunes, through scenes to which she shuddered to look forward.