farmer happened to be the next passenger, and seeing the bonnet, alighted, took it up, and rather imprudently put it on his own head. At this instant, Bargally came up with some assistants, and recognising the bonnet, charged the farmer of Bantoberick with having robbed him, and took him into custody. There being some likeness between the parties, Bargally persisted in his charge, and though the respectability of the farmer's character was proved or admitted, his trial before the Circuit Court came on accordingly. The fatal bonnet lay on the table of the Court; Bargally swore that it was the identical article worn by the man who robbed him; and he and others likewise deponed that they had found the accused on the spot where the crime was committed, with the bonnet on his head. The case looked gloomily for the prisoner, and the opinion of the judge seemed unfavourable. But there was a person in Court who knew well both who did, and who did not, commit the crime. This was the Caird of Barullion, who, thrusting himself up to the bar, near the place where Bargally was standing, suddenly seized on the bonnet, put it on his head, and looking the Laird full in the face, asked him, with a voice which attracted the attention of the Court and crowded audience,-" Look at me, sir, and tell me, by the oath you have sworn-Am not I the man who robbed you between Carsphairn and Dalmellington ?" Bargally replied, in great astonishment," By Heaven! you are the very man.”—“ You see what sort of memory this gentleman has," said the volunteer pleader: "he swears to the bonnet, whatever features are under it. If you yourself, my Lord, will put it on your head, he will be willing to swear that your Lordship was the party who robbed him between Carsphairn and Dalmellington." The tenant of Bantoberick was unanimously acquitted, and thus Willie Marshal ingeniously contrived to save an innocent man from danger, without incurring any himself, since Bargally's evidence must have seemed to every one too fluctuating to be relied upon.

While the King of the Gipsies was thus laudably occupied, his royal consort, Flora, contrived, it is said, to steal the hood from the Judge's gown; for which offence, combined with her

presumptive guilt as a gipsy, she was banished to New England, whence she never returned.

Now, I cannot grant that the idea of Meg Merrilies was, in the first concoction of the character, derived from Flora Marshal, seeing I have already said she was identified with Jean Gordon, and as I have not the Laird of Bargally's apology for charging the same fact on two several individuals. Yet I am quite content that Meg should be considered as a representative of her sect and class in general-Flora, as well as others.

The other instances in which my Gallovidian readers have obliged me, by assigning to

airy nothings

A local habitation and a name,

shall also be sanctioned so far as the Author may be entitled to do so. I think the facetious Joe Miller records a case pretty much in point; where the keeper of a Museum, while showing, as he said, the very sword with which Balaam was about to kill his ass, was interrupted by one of the visitors, who reminded him that Balaam was not possessed of a sword, but only wished for one. "True, sir," replied the ready-witted Cicerone; " but this is the very sword he wished for." The Author, in application of this story, has only to add, that, though ignorant of the coincidence between the fictions of the tale and some real circumstances, he is contented to believe he must unconsciously have thought or dreamed of the last, while engaged in the composition of Guy Mannering.

GROUNDWORK OF GUY MANNERING.—1842.

SINCE the death of Sir Walter Scott, the public have received many additional details concerning the communications that passed, while the Waverley Novels were in progress, between their Author and his devoted friend, Mr. Joseph Train, Supervisor of Excise at Castle Douglas in Galloway. Not the least curious of these particulars connects itself with the origin of Guy Mannering. Shortly after the publication of Waverley, as stated in the Life of Scott, Mr. Train forwarded to Abbotsford a MS. collection of anecdotes relating to the Galloway gipsies, together with (in Mr. Train's own words) "a local story of an astrologer, who, calling at a farm-house at the minute when the good-wife was in travail, had, it was said, predicted the future fortunes of the child almost in the words placed in the mouth of John MacKinlay in the Introduction to Guy Mannering."

At a subsequent period Mr. Train found that an ancient lady, Mrs. Young of Castle Douglas, had been in the habit of repeating once every year to her family, in order the better to preserve it in her own memory, a ballad called The Durham Garland ; from which, or some Scotch modification of it, he was inclined to conclude that both his own "local story," and that told to Scott by MacKinlay must have been derived. This Garland, as taken down from Mrs. Young's recitation by Train, shall now be appended; but it appears very probable that the ballad itself, and the stories both of Train and MacKinlay, all sprung from one and the same authentic source-namely, the romantic history of James Annesley, claimant in 1743 of the Irish peerage of Anglesey; of which history Smollett gave a very striking sketch in his Peregrine Pickle. An abstract of the Annesley case was published in the Gentleman's Magazine for 1840; and that paper also is subjoined.