There was a candour in this to which Walter’s heart assented. He feasted them with his plentiful and homely cheer—promised to visit them every day, and so to employ his shepherds that none of them should come into that quarter to distress them. Walter was as good as his word—He visited them every day—told them all the news that he could gather of the troops that beleagured them—of the executions that were weekly and daily taking place—and of every thing else relating to the state of the country. He came loaden with food to them daily; and when he found it impossible to steal his own bread, butter, and cheese, he supplied their wants from his flock. The numbers of the persecuted increased on his hands incalculably—The gudewife of Chapelhope’s bannocks vanished by scores, and the unconscionable, insatiable Brownie of Bodsbeck was blamed for the whole. Some time previous to this, a young vagrant, of the name of Kennedy, chanced to be out on these moors shooting grouse, which were extremely plentiful. He tarried until the twilight, for he had the art of calling the heath–fowl around him in great numbers, by imitating the cry of the hen. He took his station for this purpose in one of those moss–hags formerly described; but he had not well begun to call ere his ears were saluted by the whistling of so many plovers that he could not hear his own voice. He was obliged to desist, and lay for some time listening, in expectation that they would soon cease crying. When lying thus, he heard distinctly the sound of something like human voices, that spoke in whispers hard by him; he likewise imagined that he heard the pattering of feet, which he took for those of horses, and, convinced that it was a raid of the fairies, he became mortally afraid; he crept closer to the earth, and in a short time heard a swell of the most mellifluous music that ever rose on the night. He then got up, and fled with precipitation away, as he thought, from the place whence the music seemed to arise; but ere he had proceeded above an hundred paces, he met with one of the strangest accidents that ever happened to man. That same night, about, or a little before, the hour of midnight, two of Laidlaw’s men, who happened to be awake, imagined that they heard a slight noise without; they arose, and looked cautiously out at a small hole that was in the end of the stable where they slept, and beheld to their dismay the appearance of four men, who came toward them carrying a coffin; on their coming close to the corner of the stable, where the two men stood, the latter heard one of them say distinctly, in a whisper, “Where shall we lay him?” “We must leave him in the barn,” said another. “I fear,” said a third, “the door of that will be locked;” and they past on.