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triumph; but death thwarted me as you had done. Yet I will do one act of mercy--she sleeps beneath the grave where we met yesterday; and the lady before whom you wept--is your own daughter." He cast down the letter, and exclaimed, "My child! my long lost child!" And, in speechless joy, the father and the daughter rushed to each other's arms. Shall we add more? The elder Sommerville left his native land, which he never again disgraced with his presence. William and Elizabeth wandered by the hill-side in bliss, catching love and recollections from the scene. In a few months her father bestowed on him her hand, and Mrs. Douglas, in joy and in pride, bestowed upon both her blessing. THE BURGHER'S TALES. THE BROWNIE OF THE WEST BOW. I cannot say so much for the authenticity of the legend I am now to relate, as I have been able to do for some of the others in this collection; but that is no reason, I hope, for its failing to interest the reader, who makes it a necessary condition of his acceptance, that a legend shall keep within the bounds of human nature: not that any one of us can say what these bounds are, for every day of our experience is extending them in both the inner and outer worlds; and we never can be very sure whether the things which rise upon the distant horizon of our nocturnal visions are less unstable and uncertain than those that exist under our noses. True it is, at any rate, that the legend was narrated to me in a meagre form by a lady, sufficiently ancient to be supposed to be a lover of strange stories, and not imaginative or wicked enough to concoct them. That part of Edinburgh called the West Bow was, at the date of our legend, the tinsmiths' quarter; a fact which no one who chanced to walk down that way could have doubted, unless indeed he was deaf. Among the fraternity there was one destined to live in annals even with more posthumous notoriety than he of the same place and craft, who long got the credit of being the author of the "Land o' the Leal." His name was Thomas, or, according to the Scottish way of pronouncing it, Tammas Dodds; who, with a wife going under the domestic euphuism of Jenny, occupied as a dwelling-house a small flat of three rooms, in the near neighbourhood of his workshop. This couple had lived together five years, without having any children procreated of their bodies, or any quarrel born of their spirits; and thus they might have lived to the end of thei
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