form
a part of Brahma's spirit, that's all over the earth."

"All art," cried Aminadab, getting impatient of Janet's
eloquence--eloquence, I say; for Janet was a superior woman, and, though
a cook, a natural genius. "All art. 'And he made her to use
enchantments, and deal with familiar spirits and wizards,'"

"No, no, man, it was all real nature. But it wasna real nature made him
throw the poor black soul away, whose gold and jewels he had bartered
his white, I should say yellow, rotten-livered body for. Ay, if she had
been a man, I would have liked her better than him; for, as I hate the
skin of an old hen when the fat becomes rancid and golden, so do I hate
a yellow-faced man, with the devil sitting gnawing at his liver."

"The reason the devil's so bitter," said Aminadab.

"Ay, if you were to try a beef-steak off his rump or spare-rib, ye'll
find it more like the absynth I use in the kitchen than the flesh of a
capon or three-year old stot."

"Yea, I would be like unto him who was made to 'suck honey out of the
living rock.'"

"The cruel man threw her away from him, just as if her tocher had been
the weight of herself in copper, instead of gold. And oh! it was so
easily done; for the creature was not only, as I have said, light, but
she had such a touchiness when her glancing eye saw that her love was
not returned by him she loved beyond all the earth, that you would have
thought she shrunk all up into a tiny child, couring in the corner of
the big drawing-room, so like a wounded bird."

"Yaw-aw-aw," yawned the Seceder, half asleep. "'And he gave up the ghost
in the room, while he sought his meat to relieve his soul.'"

"Asleep and dreaming," cried Mrs. M'Pherson, who had got into the very
spirit of description. "Away to the Scouring Burn, and never show your
face here again."

But Aminadab soon pacified the wide-souled and wide-bodied cook, who,
being of his own persuasion, really loved the man. Yes, she was a
Seceder from the old faith; and such a Seceder! No wonder there was a
blank among the congregation of mere bodies.

It was now well on to twelve, and Aminadab had that Cradle to pass, and
the kirkyard to get through; all, too, with that idea in his head to
which we have alluded, and which, we may as well tell, was no other than
a vivid recollection of having seen this Brahma on a prior night. He had
discharged the notion at the time as an illusion, though in general he
had little power over his su