nearly gone from my thoughts, when on the South Bridge, near the head of Infirmary Street, I came up to a wretchedly-clad woman bearing in her arms a child, round which was wrapped a gaudy and apparently new shawl of the exact pattern I sought. Now, at the first glimpse of this shawl I decided that it was not the one I sought, which I imagined would scarcely be so bright and fresh-looking; but it was the incongruity of that bright shawl, allied to such rags and poverty, which made me slacken my pace, and almost instinctively follow the owner of the child. The woman was not a professional thief—a glance at her somewhat pinched features told me that—yet her poverty was so apparent that I felt by no means certain that she would not have committed a robbery under such pressure. Poverty and a hungry bairn—where is the mother who could resist the pleadings of these? Then the shawl was the only fresh thing about the queer pair. The mother’s clothes were meagre and shabby in the extreme; her boots were mere apologies for foot coverings, and her bonnet only fit for a scarecrow, and the clothing of the child equally poor. They had also a worn and travel-stained look, and stood out prominently among the ordinary passengers as dusty tramps always do when they enter a city. They were strangers, they were poor, and the child wore a tartan shawl of the exact pattern I sought—it could do no harm to follow them, which I did with a sigh for the dinner I had hoped so soon to be consuming. My interesting pair turned down Infirmary Street, and stopped at the gate of that institution—became, indeed, part of a crowd already gathering there—visitors waiting the hour of admittance to see friends. Five o’clock was the hour, and it lacked nearly ten minutes of the time. Most of these visitors were of the poorest, and they varied the monotony of the waiting by exchanging experiences and expressions of sympathy. My tramp joined in the conversation, and I soon learned from her tongue that she came from the West. The Glasgow brogue was strong in her tongue, but not strong enough, and I soon heard her say that she had come from Airdrie, which accounted for the slight difference in the accent. She was the wife of a pit labourer—an occupation considered far beneath that of a collier, who ranks as a skilled workman; and her husband in working among the hutches had got hurt in some way, and been laid up at home till their little house was almost stripped of furniture. Then the disabled man had gone to Glasgow for advice; and afterwards hearing of the great skill of the Edinburgh professors, he had scraped together enough to bring him through to this Infirmary, into which he was admitted as an indoor patient. He did not write very hopefully of recovery; and at length the wife, reduced to her last penny, had resolved to come through and see him with her own eyes.