everything about grammar except what it means; but if you will give me
the living substance and the proper spirit any gentleman who desires the
grammatical rules may have them, and be hanged to him! And, while it
may appear presumptuous, I can conscientiously say that it will not be
agreeable to me to settle down in heaven with a class of persons who
demand the rules of grammar for the intellectual reason that corresponds
to the call for crutches by one-legged men.

* * * * *

If the foregoing appear ill-tempered pray forget it. Remember rather
that I have sought to leave my friend Sir William Wallace, holding Helen
Mar on his breast as long as possible. And yet, I also loved her! Can
human nature go farther than that?

"Helen," he said to her, "life's cord is cut by God's own hand." He
stooped, he fell, and the fall shook the scaffold. Helen--that glorified
heroine--raised his head to her lap. The noble Earl of Gloucester
stepped forward, took the head in his hands.

"There," he cried in a burst of grief, letting it fall again upon the
insensible bosom of Helen, "there broke the noblest heart that ever beat
in the breast of man!"

That page or two of description I read with difficulty and agony through
blinding tears, and when Gloucester spoke his splendid eulogy my head
fell on the table and I broke into such wild sobbing that the little
family sprang up in astonishment. I could not explain until my mother,
having led me to my room, succeeded in soothing me into calmness and
I told her the cause of it. And she saw me to bed with sympathetic