Of this kind of partially-revealed secrets was the story of the young cousin. No name or personal marks or place of origin ever came to the public ear, far less the form or features of the sacrificed; only, and no more, that a cousin of Helen M'Dougal's,--by uncle or aunt uncertain,--left her mother and sister,--from whence, also under the gnome,--to visit her relative in Edinburgh. It was known that she entered under the door-lintel of Log's lodgings, and was never seen again. If the world, as a spasmodic poet tells us, were destroyed, a few atoms left of the wreck, with their internal forces of attraction and repulsion, would enable a philosopher to tell how it was made. We smile at the extravagance, while we acknowledge some kind of truth, which we cannot understand. These small traces of the little world of crime within the back room "with the window looking out on the dead wall," long since destroyed and erased from the bigger world of which it formed a part and the shame, may be brought together and filled up by the imagination, with a certainty so far removed from the feeling of fiction, that we might scarcely regret the want of particulars. We have had small need of that faculty in our history; yet, comparatively, of that little world we know next to nothing. We might as well deny to the welcomed cousin a name and a place of birth, as refuse to believe that she went into that house with the expectation of meeting friendship, if not love, to a greater degree than what was held out to the hope of others. They would shake hands with her--(what love and hypocrisy don't?)--and there would be inquiries after the mother, and the sister too;--just what takes place at all such meetings. Nor are we to forget the welcome in the still more common shape, not the fatted calf, but the bottle of whisky, so useful an auxiliary there. If the paramour or husband of her cousin ever sung his sentimental airs, he would surely not refuse on the occasion of a visit of one allied to him in the bonds of affinity. There could not help being joy, for it was through the light of the feeling of mirth that these eight eyes looked on the guest they were making happy. Those who have read the German tale of the two eyes which followed everywhere Hans Kauffmann, and never glared upon him but when he was alone in the dark, and which at an after-period he saw shining in the face of his enemy, as that enemy, the wreaker of vengeance, stood over him with the thirsty sword, may trace a resemblance; but as for these eyes of the four hosts looking anger on the poor relative, we may safely place that among the impossibilities--and surely we do that more easily than we can fancy the expression of that peculiar welcome.