The Mystery of Cloomber

. Andrews, have endeavoured in the ensuing pages to lay my sta

deeper shadow over the strange passages of which I shall have to speak. My highest ambition is that those who know something of the matter should, after

ply satisfied with the outcome of my first,

r, through the kind cooperation of friends, hit upon a plan which promises to be less onerous to me and more satisfactory to the reader. This is nothing less than to make use of the various ma

ising at Stranraer, in Wigtownshire. To these I shall add a verbatim account extracted from the journal of the late John Berthier Heatherstone, of the events which occurred in

ative. By this arrangement I have sunk from the position of an author to that of a compiler, but

rs. He it was who first after Sir William Jones called attention to the great value of early Persian literature, and his translations from the Hafiz and

eruhmte und sehr gelhernte Hunter West von Edinburgh"-a passage which I well remember that

it is termed in Scotland, but his learned hobby absorbed so much of

with his brain more exercised over the code which Menu propounded six hundred years before the birth of Christ than over the knotty problems of Scottish law in the nineteenth century. Hence it can

hould have been forced to retire into genteel poverty, consoling ourselves with the aphorisms and precepts of Firdousi, Omar Khayyam, and others of h

kest and most barren tract of land in the whole of a bleak and barren shire. As a bachelor, however, his expenses had been small, and he had contrived from the rents of

nksome told us that one of his lungs had been growing weaker for some time, and that Dr. Easterling, of Stranraer, had strongly advised him to spend the few years which were left to him in some more genial climate. He had determined, t

ot take us long to decide upon the acceptance of the laird's generous offer. My father started for Wigtown that very night, while Esther and I followed a few day