And no doubt the poor girl's heart jumped to the valediction. She began to get cheerful under the new-lighted lamp of hope; and if there was any deficiency in the oil, it was supplied by the cognate combustible which, like all other agents of the same kind, consumes by its latent fires those who consume it. Glass succeeded glass, and with hope getting brighter and brighter before her eyes, now dry enough, and sympathy sounding louder and louder in her ears, what marvel that Mary Haldane should be as happy as those who had preceded her in those jubilations. She talked of her lovers and her youthful escapades--not forgetting those whisky-born fortunes, embracing equipages and servants, which are the continual destiny of the wretched, as if nature, in some mood of pity, made an imaginary compensation for real privations and as real misery. How little conscious was she that the two men, who responded so exuberantly to her wild aspirations, were watching when they would exhaust and bring her "to the point." Nor was the issue long delayed. Mary was one of those who, once fairly begun, never stopped, if the means were in her power, till she had run the full course. The symptoms of the artificial narcosis began to shew themselves,--the thick speech, the heavy eye, the bent head, and only a little longer and she was extended on the floor. Let us not speak of this girl's youth, the interest of her peculiar fortunes, with no chance ever given her of putting even the first step in the path of virtue. Why, there was, even in the estimation of those who stood over, ready for the work of their calling, a curious if not stimulating aptitude in sending her after her mother. Did she not call there to see her, and find her? and why should they defeat so laudable a purpose? The quarter of an hour's suspension between life and death, with those mysterious agonies of which the organism is capable, even in the absence of manifestations, or at least in their suppression by external force, and Mary Haldane experienced the fate of her mother. And with her mother, too, she lay that night in the hall of Surgeon's Square. The Grandmother and the Dumb Boy.