Page:Tales of my landlord (Volume 4).djvu/345

 cleugh, and in the neighbourhood, with great success, for about forty years.—Knowing her taste for narratives of this description, I requested her to look over the loose sheets the morning before I waited on her, and enlighten me by the experience which she must have acquired in reading through the whole stock of three circulating libraries in Gandercleugh and the two next market-towns. When, with a palpitating heart, I appeared before her in the evening, I found her much disposed to be complimentary.

"I have not been more affected," said she, wiping the glasses of her spectacles, "by any novel, excepting the Tale of Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, which is indeed pathos itself; but your plan of omitting a formal conclusion will never do. You may be as harrowing to our nerves as you will in the course of your story, but, unless you had the genius of the author of Julia de Roubigné, never let the end be altoge-