my father has often been told in the nursery how the devil's
coach, drawn by six coal-black horses with fiery eyes, would drive at
night into the West Bow, and belated people might see the dead Major
through the glasses.

Another legend is that of the two maiden sisters. A legend I am afraid
it may be, in the most discreditable meaning of the term; or perhaps
something worse--a mere yesterday's fiction. But it is a story of some
vitality, and is worthy of a place in the Edinburgh kalendar. This pair
inhabited a single room; from the facts, it must have been
double-bedded; and it may have been of some dimensions; but when all is
said, it was a single room. Here our two spinsters fell out--on some
point of controversial divinity belike: but fell out so bitterly that
there was never a word spoken between them, black or white, from that
day forward. You would have thought they would separate: but no; whether
from lack of means, or the Scottish fear of scandal, they continued to
keep house together where they were. A chalk line drawn upon the floor
separated their two domains; it bisected the doorway and the fireplace,
so that each could go out and in, and do her cooking, without violating
the territory of the other. So, for years, they co-existed in a hateful
silence; their meals, their ablutions, their friendly visitors, exposed
to an unfriendly scrutiny; and at night, in the dark watches, each could
hear the breathing of her enemy. Never did four walls look down upon an
uglier spectacle than these sisters rivaling in unsisterliness. Here is
a canvas for Hawthorne to have turned into a cabinet picture--he had a
Puritanic vein, which would have fitted him to treat this Puritanic
horror; he could have shown them to us in their sicknesses and at their
hideous twin devotions, thumbing a pair of great Bibles, or praying
aloud for each other's penitence with marrowy emphasis; now each, with
kilted petticoat, at her own corner of the fire on some tempestuous
evening; now sitting each at her window, looking out upon the summer
landscape sloping far below them towards the firth, and the field-paths
where they had wandered hand in hand; or, as age and infirmity grew upon
them and prolonged their toilettes, and their hands began to tremble and
their heads to nod involuntarily, growing only the more steeled in
enmity with years; until one fine day, at a word, a look, a visit, or
the approach of death, their hearts would melt and the c