Now it must be confessed that our friend Sampson, although a profound scholar and mathematician, had not travelled so far in philosophy as to doubt the reality of witchcraft or apparitions. Born, indeed, at a time when a doubt in the existence of witches was interpreted as equivalent to a justification of their infernal practices, a belief of such legends had been impressed upon the Dominie as an article indivisible from his religious faith, and perhaps it would have been equally difficult to have induced him to doubt the one as the other. With these feelings, and in a thick misty day, which was already drawing to its close, Dominie Sampson did not pass the Kaim of Derncleugh without some feelings of tacit horror. What, then, was his astonishment when, on passing the door--that door which was supposed to have been placed there by one of the latter Lairds of Ellangowan to prevent presumptuous strangers from incurring the dangers of the haunted vault--that door, supposed to be always locked, and the key of which was popularly said to be deposited with the presbytery--that door, that very door, opened suddenly, and the figure of Meg Merrilies, well known, though not seen for many a revolving year, was placed at once before the eyes of the startled Dominie! She stood immediately before him in the footpath, confronting him so absolutely that he could not avoid her except by fairly turning back, which his manhood prevented him from thinking of. ‘I kenn’d ye wad be here,’ she said, with her harsh and hollow voice; ‘I ken wha ye seek; but ye maun do my bidding.’ ‘Get thee behind me!’ said the alarmed Dominie. ‘Avoid ye! Conjuro te, scelestissima, nequissima, spurcissima, iniquissima atque miserrima, conjuro te!!!’ Meg stood her ground against this tremendous volley of superlatives, which Sampson hawked up from the pit of his stomach and hurled at her in thunder. ‘Is the carl daft,’ she said, ‘wi’ his glamour?’ ‘Conjuro,’ continued the Dominie, ‘abjuro, contestor atque viriliter impero tibi!’ ‘What, in the name of Sathan, are ye feared for, wi’ your French gibberish, that would make a dog sick? Listen, ye stickit stibbler, to what I tell ye, or ye sail rue it while there’s a limb o’ ye hings to anither! Tell Colonel Mannering that I ken he’s seeking me. He kens, and I ken, that the blood will be wiped out, and the lost will be found, And Bertram’s right and Bertram’s might Shall meet on Ellangowan height. Hae, there’s a letter to him; I was gaun to send it in another way. I canna write mysell; but I hae them that will baith write and read, and ride and rin for me. Tell him the time’s coming now, and the weird’s dreed, and the wheel’s turning. Bid him look at the stars as he has looked at them before. Will ye mind a’ this?’ ‘Assuredly,’ said the Dominie, ‘I am dubious; for, woman, I am perturbed at thy words, and my flesh quakes to hear thee.’ ‘They’ll do you nae ill though, and maybe muckle gude.’