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 rivalling 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 chalk boundary
be overstepped for ever.

Alas! to those who know the ecclesiastical history
of the race - the most perverse and melancholy in man's
annals - this will seem only a figure of much that is
typical of Scotland and her high-seated capital above the
Forth - a figure so grimly realistic that it may pass
with strangers for a caricature. We are wonderful
patient haters for conscience sake up here in the North.
I spoke, in the first of these papers, of the Parliaments