THE STORY OF THE GIRL FORGER.

It is a common thing for writers of a certain class, when they want to produce the feeling of wonder in their readers, to introduce some frantic action, and then to account for it by letting out the secret that the actor was mad.  The trick is not so necessary as it seems, for the strength of human passions is a potentiality only limited by experience; and so it is that a sane person may under certain stimulants do the maddest thing in the world.  The passion itself is always true—­it is only the motive that may be false; and therefore it is that in narrating for your amusement, perhaps I may add instruction, the following singular story—­traces of the main parts of which I got in the old books of a former procurator-fiscal—­I assume that there was no more insanity in the principal actor, Euphemia, or, as she was called, Effie Carr, when she brought herself within the arms of the law, than there is in you, when now you are reading the story of her strange life.  She was the only daughter of John Carr, a grain merchant, who lived in Bristo Street.  It would be easy to ascribe to her all the ordinary and extraordinary charms that are thought so necessary to embellish heroines; but as we are not told what these were in her case, we must be contented with the assurance that nature had been kind enough to her to give her power over the hearts of men.  We shall be nearer our purpose when we state, what is necessary to explain a peculiar part of our story, that her father, in consequence of his own insufficient education, had got her trained to help him in keeping his accounts with the farmers, and in writing up his books; nay, she enjoyed the privilege of writing his drafts upon the Bank of Scotland, which the father contrived to sign, though in his own illiterate way, and with a peculiarity which it would not have been easy to imitate.

But our gentle clerk did not consider these duties imposed upon her by her father as excluding her either from gratifying her love of domestic habits, by assisting her mother in what at that time was denominated hussyskep or housekeeping, or from a certain other gratification, which might without a hint from us be anticipated—­no other than the luxury of falling head and ears, and heart too we fancy, in love with a certain dashing young student of the name of Robert Stormonth, then attending the University, more for the sake of polish than of mere study, for he was the son of the proprietor of Kelton, and required to follow no profession.  How Effie got entangled with this youth we have no means of knowing, so we must be contented with the Scotch proverb—­

  “Tell me where the flea may bite,
  And I will tell where love may light.”