her condition, when she was taken ill, and obliged to procure a
lodging with all speed. Ferguson selected the wretched hovel alluded
to, as being away from all chance of discovery by his or her friends,
and after my visit, empowered me to engage a nurse, and make what
other arrangements I could for Miss L----'s comfort. She managed to
get a confidential friend to telegraph her father from Quebec that
she had arrived in that city, and then sent on a letter and had it
mailed there, stating that she had gone on the steamboat the
previous evening to see some friends off, and, remaining too long on
board, was taken away eastward, but would return on receiving the
passage money from Montreal.

With this story she managed to deceive her otherwise astute father,
and in four days she actually got up and went to her own home in a
carriage; insisting on retiring immediately to her room in
consequence of the nervous excitement and fatigue she had undergone.
The nurse I had engaged to attend her, she on some pretence or
another smuggled into the house as a domestic servant, and so not
only managed to have an attendant, but to keep up a clandestine
communication with Ferguson and the outer world.

In the frantic hope of acquiring a rapid fortune, Ferguson migrated
to New Orleans, but just then the American war broke out, and he was
pressed into the service. Whether he was killed or not Miss L----
never found out; his letters became gradually less frequent, till
finally she lost all trace of him whatever, and she eventually
married a wholesale merchant of this city, who is to this day
probably unaware of this little episode in his wife's former career.
Sometimes I see her in her carriage driving with liveried servants
along St. James street, and I cannot refrain from thinking of the