Though not so much a tradition as a memory still fresh probably in the minds of some of the good old Edinburgh folks, we here offer, chiefly for the benefit of our young female readers who are fond of a story wherein little heroines figure, as in Béranger's Sylphide, an account of a very famous adventure of a certain little Jeannie Deans in our city—the more like the elder Jeannie, inasmuch as they both were concerned in a loving effort to save the life of a sister. Whereunto, as a very necessary introduction, it behoves us to set forth that there was, some sixty years ago, more or less, a certain Mr. William Maconie, who was a merchant on the South Bridge of Edinburgh, but who, for the sake of exercise and fresh air—a commodity this last he need not have gone so far from the Calton Hill to seek—resided at Juniper Green, a little village three or four miles from St. Giles's. Nor did this distance incommode him much, seeing that he had the attraction to quicken his steps homewards of a pretty young wife and two little twin daughters, Mary and Annie, as like each other as two rosebuds partially opened, and as like their mother, too, as the objects of our simile are to themselves when full blown.
Peculiar in this respect of having twins at the outset, and sisters too—a good beginning of a contract to perpetuate the species—Mr. Maconie was destined to be even more so, inasmuch as there came no more of these pleasant deliciae domi, at least up to the time of our curious story—a circumstance the more to be regretted by the father, in consequence of a strange fancy (never told to his wife) that possessed him of wishing to insure the lives of his children as they came into the world, or at least after they had got through the rather uninsurable period of mere infant life. And in execution of this fancy—a very fair and reasonable one, and not uncommon at that time, whatever it may be now, when people are not so provident—he had got an insurance to the extent of five hundred pounds effected in the Pelican Office—perhaps the most famous at that time—on the lives of the said twins, Mary and Annie, who were, no doubt, altogether unconscious of the importance they were thus made to hold in the world.
Yet, unfortunately for the far-seeing and provident father, this scheme threatened to fructify sooner than he wished, if indeed it could ever have fructified to his satisfaction; for the grisly spectre of typhus laid his relentless hand upon Mary when she—and of a consequence Annie—was somewhere about eight years old. And surely, being as we are very hopeful optimists in the cause of human nature, we need not say that the father, as he and his wife watched the suffering invalid on through the weary days and nights of the progress towards the crisis of that dangerous ailment, never once thought of the Pelican, except as a bird that feeds its young with the warm blood of its breast. But, sorrowful as they were, their grief was nothing in comparison with the distress of little Annie, who slipped about listening and making all manner of anxious inquiries about her sick sister, whom she was prohibited from seeing for fear of her being touched by the said spectre; nor was her heart the less troubled with fears for her life, that all things seemed so quiet and mysterious about the house—the doctor coming and going, and the father and mother whispering to each other, but never to her, and their faces so sad-like and mournful, in place of being, as was their wont, so cheerful and happy.
And surely all this solicitude on the part of Annie Maconie need not excite our wonder, when we consider that, from the time of their birth, the twin sisters had never been separated, but that, from the moment they had made their entrance on this world's stage, they had been always each where the other was, and had run each where the other ran, wished each what the other wished, and wept and laughed each when the other wept or laughed. Nature indeed, before it came into her fickle head to make two of them, had in all probability intended these little sisters—"little cherries on one stalk"—to be but one; and they could only be said not to be one, because of their bodies being two—a circumstance of no great importance, for, in spite of the duality of body, the spirit that animated them was a unity, and as we know from an old philosopher called Plato, the spirit is really the human creature, the flesh and bones constituting the body being nothing more than a mere husk intended at the end to feed worms. And then the mother helped this sameness by dressing them so like each other, as if she wanted to make a Comedy of Errors out of the two little female Dromios.
But in the middle of this mystery and solicitude, it happened that Annie was to get some light; for, at breakfast one morning—not yet that of the expected crisis—when her father and mother were talking earnestly in an undertone to each other, all unaware that the child, as she was moving about, was watching their words and looks, much as an older victim of credulity may be supposed to hang on the cabbalistic movements and incantations of a sibyl, the attentive little listener eagerly drank in every word of the following conversation:—
"The doctor is so doubtful," said the anxious mother, with a tear in her eye, "that I have scarcely any hope; and if she is taken away, the very look of Annie, left alone 'bleating for her sister lamb,' will break my heart altogether."
"Yes," rejoined Mr. Maconie, "it would be hard to bear; but"—and it was the first time since Mary's illness he had ever remembered the insurance—"it was wise that I insured poor Mary's life in the Pelican."
"Insured her life in the Pelican!" echoed the wife in a higher tone. "That was at least lucky; but, oh! I hope we will not need to have our grief solaced by that comfort in affliction for many a day."
And this colloquy had scarcely been finished when the doctor entered, having gone previously into the invalid's room, with a very mournful expression upon his face; nor did his words make that expression any more bearable, as he said—
"I am sorry to say I do not like Mary's appearance so well to-day. I fear it is to be one of those cases where we cannot discover anything like a crisis at all; indeed I have doubts about this old theory being applicable to this kind of fever, where the virus goes on gradually working to the end."