Blyth, so in an equal ratio he hated his good helpmate Jenny.  And then began that other wonderful process called reconciliation, whereby the wish gradually overcomes scruples through the cunning mean of falsifying their aspects.  Whereunto, again, the new mistress contributed in the adroit way of all such wretches—­instilling into his ear the moral poison which deadened the apperception of these scruples at the same time that it brought out the advantages of disregarding them.  The result of all which was, that Jenny’s husband, of whom she had made a slave, for his own good and benefit, as she thought, and not without reason, arrived, by small degrees, and by relays of new motives, one after another, at the conclusion of actually removing her from this big world, and of course also from that little one to her so dear, even that of her household empire.

A resolution this, which, terrible and revolting as it may appear to those who are happily beyond the influence of “the wish,” was far more easily formed than executed; for Nature—­although improvident herself of her children, swallowing them up in thousands by earthquakes, tearing them by machinery, and drowning them in the sea by shiploads—­is very careful to defend one of them against another.  Every scheme the husband could think of was surrounded with difficulties, and one by one was laid aside, till he came to that of precipitating his faithful Jenny, as if by accident, into a deep pool in the North Loch, that sheet of water which contained as many secrets in its bosom as that more romantic one in Italy, not far removed from a certain pious nunnery.  Even here there was the difficulty of getting Jenny out at night, and down Cranstoun’s Close, and to west of the foot thereof, where the said deep pool was, for no other ostensible purpose in the world than to see the moon shedding her beams on the surface of the water—­an object not half so beautiful to her as the clear tin pan made by her own Tammas, and in which she made her porridge every morning.  But the adage about the will and the way is of such wondrous universality, that one successful effort seems as nothing in the diversity of man’s inventions; and so it turned out to be comparatively easy to get Janet out one evening for the reason that her husband did not feel very well, and would like his supper the better for a walk along the edge of the loch, in which, if it was her pleasure, she would not refuse to accompany him.  So pleasant a way of putting the thing harmonized with Janet’s love of rule, and she agreed upon the condition she made with herself, by means of the eternal soliloquy, that she would put on the stew to be progressing towards unctuousness and tenderness before they went.  Was that to be Janet’s last act of her darling hussyskep?  It would not be consistent with our art were we to tell you; but this much is certain, that Janet Dodds went down Cranstoun’s Close along with her beloved Tammas, that shortly after