axle, but it gradually shoaled again, and the vehicle was on the point of reaching the dry part of the road, when, like a shot, man and boy, and horse and cart, disappeared amidst the roaring eddies. "I ran out; the villagers had noticed the accident also; we all hurried to the spot. The horse was struggling and snorting, and standing on his hind legs, between the trams, in a vain attempt to get free from the cart that was dragging him down the stream, but auld Hempy had disappeared. "'What's that? There's the callant, there's the callant--see his bit head sooming down the stream like an otter'---- "I saw it, threw off my coat, and plunged in; but the upshot was, that although Tam Clink the blacksmith saved the _child_, the _dominie_ was near drowned; for I found to my cost that a stick-leg wasna canny to soom with, the buoyancy thereof producing a corresponding and very dangerous depression of the caput. "We saved the boy; but the horse and cart, and Hempy himsell, were all drowned; it was the first time, I mind, that I had ever seen a dead corpse. The puir auld chiel was a stout buirdly man--he might have weighed sixteen stone; but when we gat him that forenoon, after the river had cast him ashore, stark and stiff, and carried him, and laid him out in the kirk aisle, it was fearful to observe how he had shrunk in bulk after the water had ran oot o' him; it wasna aften he took muckle o' that same in, so it was a sure sign he was dead; his stomach having fallen, had left the arch of his deep chest in fearful relief, and then the pinching of his blue features and the death-girn on his upper lip, that showed his twa buck teeth as if in anger--It was a maist awfu' sicht. "'What! are you frichtened, Saunders?' said a voice close to me--'are you frichtened to look on a dead man, dominie? If you had been in Paris with me last summer, man, you would have seen a dozen lying every morning in the Morgue--ay, as nice and caller as if they had been haddies in a fishmonger's shop.' "I looked up at the heartless creature. 'He was the father of a family, Mr Adderfang, and that drooked and shivering callant, that's greeting there at the head of the corp, is his son; and mair forby, he was a tenant o' yeer ain, sir, and'----