ion to his countenance and manner, that one would as soon have
thought of one's grandfather as an unsafe companion for young girls. I
still possess a document, duly drawn up and engrossed in the form of a
deed by his brother, embodying a promise which he made to me jestingly
one day, that when he was dead he would not fail to let me know, if ever
ghosts were permitted to revisit the earth, by appearing to me, binding
himself by this contract that the vision should be unaccompanied by the
smallest smell of sulphur or flash of blue flame, and that instead of
the indecorous undress of a slovenly winding-sheet, he would wear his
usual garments, and the familiar brown great-coat with which, to use his
own expression, he "buttoned his bones together" in his life. I
remembered that laughing promise when, years after it was given, the
news of his death reached me, and I thought how little dismay I should
feel if it could indeed have been possible for me to see again, "in his
image as he lived," that kind and excellent friend. On one of the
occasions when Dr. Combe took me to visit one of his patients, we went
to a quaint old house in the near neighborhood of Edinburgh. If the
Laird of Dumbiedike's mansion had been still standing, it might have
been that very house. The person we went to visit was an old Mr. M----,
to whom he introduced me, and with whom he withdrew, I suppose for a
professional consultation, leaving me in a strange, curious,
old-fashioned apartment, full of old furniture, old books, and faded,
tattered, old nondescript articles, whose purpose it was not easy to
guess, but which must have been of some value, as they were all
protected from the air and dust by glass covers. When the gentlemen
returned, Mr. M---- gratified my curiosity by showing every one of them
to me in detail, and informing me that they had all belonged to, or were
in some way relics of, Charles Edward Stuart. "And this," said the old
gentleman, "was his sword." It was a light dress rapier, with a very
highly cut and ornamented steel hilt. I half drew the blade, thinking
how it had flashed from its scabbard, startling England and dazzling
Scotland at its first unsheathing, and in what inglorious gloom of
prostrate fortunes it had rusted away at last, the scorn of those who
had opposed, and the despair of those who had embraced, its cause. "And
so that was the Pretender's sword!" said I, hardly aware that I had
spoken until the little, withered,