answer.  However, Susan made fresh, after which wanting the pan to put it in, she went to throw away what was before in it.  Upon tilting the pan, she perceived a white powder at the bottom, which she knew could not be oatmeal.  She showed it her fellow-servant, when, feeling it, they found it gritty.  They then too plainly perceived what it was had made their poor master ill.  What was to be done?  Susan immediately carried the pan with the gruel and powder in it to Mrs. Mounteney, a neighbour and friend of the deceased.  Mrs. Mounteney kept it till it was delivered to the apothecary, the apothecary delivered it to the physician, and he will tell you that upon trying it he found it to be white arsenic.  Mr. Blandy continued from day to day to grow worse.  At last, upon the Saturday morning, Susan Gunnell, an old honest, maidservant, uneasy to see how her poor master had been treated, went to his bedside, and, in the most prudent and gentlest manner, broke to him what had been the cause of his illness, and the strong ground there was to suspect that his daughter was the occasion of it.  The father, with a fondness greater than ever a father felt before, cried out, “Poor love-sick girl!  What will not a woman do for the man she loves?  But who do you think gave her the powder?” She answered, “She could not tell, unless it was sent by Mr. Cranstoun.”  “I believe so too,” says the master, “for I remember he has talked learnedly of poisons.  I always thought there was mischief in those cursed Scotch pebbles.”

Soon afterwards he got up and came to breakfast in his parlour, where his daughter and Mr. Littleton, his clerk, then were.  A dish of tea, in the usual manner, was ready poured out for him.  He just tasted it and said, “This tea has a bad taste,” looked at the cup, then looked hard at his daughter.  She was, for the first time, shocked, burst into tears, and ran out of the room.  The poor father, more shocked than the daughter, poured the tea into the cat’s basin, and went to the window to recover himself.  She soon came again into the room.  Mr. Littleton said, “Madam, I fear your father is very ill, for he has flung away his tea.”  Upon this news she trembled, and the tears again stood in her eyes.  She again withdraws.  Soon afterwards the father came into the kitchen, and, addressing himself to her, said, “Molly, I had like to have been poisoned twenty years ago, and now I find I shall die by poison at last.”  This was warning sufficient.  She immediately went upstairs, brought down Mr. Cranstoun’s letters, together with the remainder of the poison, and threw them (as she thought unobserved) into the fire.  Thinking she had now cleared herself from the suspicious appearances of poison, her spirits mend, “she thanked God that she was much better, and said her mind was more at ease than it had been.”  Alas! how often does that which we fondly imagine will save us become our destruction?  So it was in the present instance.  For providentially, though the letters were destroyed,