This story was very soon made readable to Liston and the others by the concatenation of certain very simple circumstances. A newspaper report which Liston had seen some days before, had announced the death, by drowning, of a young sailor belonging to Limekilns. The account was sufficiently lugubrious for any readers; but the editor, as usual, had mixed up with it, whether truly or not, the old story of love and impending marriage; the object too being, of course, young, brave, virtuous, and comely. Then came the account of the funeral, also touchingly given. But it seemed that all this poetry had been thrown away upon the ardent anatomist; nor even when afterwards, in the hall, he became satisfied that he had secured the right object, would he in his heart admit that he had in this adventure done anything more than would be justified by the use he could make of his knowledge in ameliorating physical evils in his fellow-men, however dearly that advantage might have been acquired in the agony of that figure he had left wailing at Rosyth. Yet it is but fair to say that Liston himself admitted that the sound of that cry, the sight of those wringing hands, and the rapid goings to and fro of the shade on the shore, never passed from his memory. Robert Liston, beyond all the others, carried so much of the spirit of chivalry into his adventures of body-snatching, that he thought it as noble an act to carry off a corpse as an ancient knight-errant did to bear off a prisoner; but his followers were more like mimallons than myrmidons, and required more of the flask to keep up their spirits. Some of these youths once made a mistake at Rosyth. Having run up their boat, they proceeded to the little death's croft to take up the body of a woman who had died in child-bed. The night was dark and gusty, and the wind whistled through the long grass as if Nænia had been presiding there to hear her own doleful music; but our youths cared little for these things, and, after twenty minutes' work, they pulled up "the tall beauty," as they called her after they got home. Away they hurried her to the dike, upon which they laid her, till two got over to place her in the boat. All seemed fair, but just at the moment, some ill-mannered tyke set up, without the excuse of a moon,--for she was far enough away beyond the shadows,--a deep howl, so prolonged and mournful, that even all the potency of the flask could not save them from being struck with awe, as well as a fear of detection. But they had more to be afraid of, for almost immediately after, one of them called out, "There's a lantern among the graves;" and thus flurried, yet determined not to lose their prize, they rugged the body from the top of the rubble dike so roughly, if not violently, that a great portion of the long hair, which had got entangled among the stones, was, along with a piece of the scalp, torn away, and left hanging on the other side. Safe on board, they lost no time in