the woman alive
for months? Questions these put by a roused curiosity, and perhaps not
worth answer. Was not she a woman, and was not that enough?

Not enough; for legendary details cluster round startling events, and
often carry a moral which may prevent a repetition of these; and so, had
it not been for this apparently inexplicable death by starvation, our
wonderful story might never have gathered listeners round the evening
fire. We must go back some twenty years before the date of the said
sermon to find a certain merchant-burgess of the city of Edinburgh,
David Grierson, occupying a portion of a front land situated in the
Canongate, a little to the east of Leith Wynd. It would be sheer
affectation in us to pretend that this merchant-burgess had any mental
or physical characteristic about him to justify his appearance in a
romance, if we except the power he had shown of amassing wealth, of
which he had so much that he could boast the possession of more than
twenty goodly tenements, some of wood and some of stone, besides shares
of ships and bank stock. And no doubt this exception might stand for the
thing excepted from, for money, though commonly said to be extraneous,
is often so far in its influences intraneous, that it changes the
feelings and motives, and enables them to work. And then don't we know
that it is by extraneous things we are mostly led? But however all that
may be, certain it is that our merchant-burgess was a great man in his
own house in the Canongate, where his family consisted of Rachel
Grierson, his natural daughter, by a woman who had been long dead, and
Walter Grierson, his legitimate nephew, who had been left an orphan in
his early years, and who was his nearest lawful heir. Two servants
completed the household; and surely in this rather curious combination
there might be, if only circumstances were favourable to their
development, elements which might impart interest to a story.

So long as the shadow of the dark angel was, as Time counted, far away
from him, Burgess David was comparatively happy; but as he got old and
older, he began to realize the condition of the poet--

"Now pleasure will no longer please,
And all the joys of life are gone;
I ask no more on earth but ease,
To be at peace, and be alone:
I ask in vain the winged powers
That weave man's destiny on high;
In vain I ask the golden hours
That o'er my head for ever fly."

Then he waxed more and mo