"I ken that baith you and I are owre lang here," replied the beadsman, as he hurried out. In a few minutes the muir was clear. The two took different directions; nor was Henry Leslie heard of again for a period of two years. During this interval, an investigation was made into the circumstances attending the murder of Blackburn. There was no evidence brought home to Melville; and the opinion prevailed that the commendator had fallen accidentally into the chasm. Melville, meanwhile, withdrew himself again to the Continent, where he died. The property was again restored to Margaret, in consideration of the injuries sustained by her parents. The death of Hamilton produced, throughout Scotland, so great an effect, that the prosecutions for heresy were for a time suspended, and Leslie returned to his native country. From the circumstance of Falconcleugh and Riddlestain being afterwards in the family of the Leslies, we may augur something of a union between the two lovers of our story. We merely, however, throw out this as a conjecture--our attention having been chiefly directed to the more important parts of the strange legend we have now given, which certainly does not exceed credibility. THE LYKEWAKE. I know no place where one may be brought acquainted with the more credulous beliefs of our forefathers at a less expense of inquiry and exertion, than in a country lykewake. The house of mourning is naturally a place of sombre thoughts and ghostly associations. There is something, too, in the very presence and appearance of death, that leads one to think of the place and state of the dead. Cowper has finely said, that the man and the beast who stand together, side by side, on the same hill-top, are, notwithstanding their proximity, the denizens of very different worlds. And I have felt the remark to apply still more strongly when sitting beside the dead. The world of intellect and feeling in which we ourselves are, and of which the lower propensities of our nature form a province, may be regarded as including, in part at least, that world of passion and instinct in which the brute lives; and we have but to analyse and abstract a little, to form for ourselves ideas of this latter world from even our own experience. But by what process of thought can we bring experience to bear on the world of the dead? It lies entirely beyond us--a _terra incognita_ of cloud and darkness, and yet the thing at our side--the thing over which we can stretch our hand--the thing dead to us but living to _it_--has entered upon it, and, however uninformed or ignorant before, knows more of its dark, and, to us, inscrutable mysteries, than all our philosophers and all our divines. Is it wonder that we would fain _put it to the question_--that we would fain catechise it, if we could, regarding its newly-acquired experience--that we should fill up the gaps in the dialogue which its silence leaves to us, by imparting to one another the