Some traces were also got of Helen M'Dougal.[22] Upon her release from the lock-up house, she had the audacity or folly to repair to her old haunts in the West Port, and even to appear in the street. She was recognised in an instant, and at once surrounded by a mob threatening to seize her, but fortunately the proximity of the district office insured protection, and with difficulty she was lodged. Yet this was only the sign for an uproar. The mob increased to an alarming size for the slender force, and the officers were obliged to resort to an expedient to prevent an assault. A ladder was placed at a back window, by which it was pretended that she had got down, and the mob having dispersed, probably to pursue her, she was conveyed, under an escort, to the head-office. Again venturing out, she was repeatedly exposed to similar dangers, till, finding it impossible to put out her head in Edinburgh, she left secretly for Redding in Stirlingshire. She afterwards left that village, no doubt to be a wanderer, like the others, and with as little hope of rest to her feet as of peace to her soul. The Final Cause. There are one or two considerations connected with the history we have given which, though having something of a philosophical look, are yet sufficiently practical to be appreciated by the ordinary observer of human nature and the ways of God with His creatures. It is doubtful if, from the beginning, the actors in this drama were ever sufficiently understood; if it is not more true to say, that the people, eager to conserve the prestige of man's dignity, have been inclined, after the manner of purists, to set off exceptions to the general laws of human nature as the foil of some heaven-born exemption from crime. They have uniformly mixed contempt with their hatred of these strange men. They have not thought them entitled to be objects of consideration, far less study. They have represented them as something so far below their kind, that their deeds can no more enter as elements into a lesson than those of maniacs, or of the lower animals, who are exempted from the laws of responsibility, and so they have shewn an inclination to cast them out of the wide province of history; or, if they would allow them to remain within the precincts of annals, they would consign them to the grotesque page of _monstra horrenda_.