Produced by Barbara Watson, woodie4 and the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team at http://www.pgdpcanada.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR. BY JAMES HOGG, AUTHOR OF "THE QUEEN'S WAKE," &c. &c. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. WILLIAM BLACKWOOD, EDINBURGH; AND T. CADELL, LONDON. MDCCCXXIX. ADVERTISEMENT. The greater number of the Tales contained in these volumes appeared originally in BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. They have been revised with care; and to complete the Collection, several Tales hitherto unpublished have been added. CONTENTS OF VOL I. PAGE. CHAP. I. Rob Dodds, 1 II. Mr Adamson of Laverhope, 33 III. The Prodigal Son, 69 IV. The School of Misfortune, 112 V. George Dobson's Expedition to Hell, 131 VI. The Souters of Selkirk, 148 VII. The Laird of Cassway, 176 VIII. Tibby Hyslop's Dream, 212 IX. Mary Burnet, 247 X. The Brownie of the Black Haggs, 285 XI. The Laird of Wineholm, 311 THE SHEPHERD'S CALENDAR. CHAPTER I. ROB DODDS. It was on the 13th of February 1823, on a cold stormy day, the snow lying from one to ten feet deep on the hills, and nearly as hard as ice, when an extensive store-farmer in the outer limits of the county of Peebles went up to one of his led farms, to see how his old shepherd was coming on with his flocks. A partial thaw had blackened some spots here and there on the brows of the mountains, and over these the half-starving flocks were scattered, picking up a scanty sustenance, while all the hollow parts, and whole sides of mountains that lay sheltered from the winds on the preceding week, when the great drifts blew, were heaped and over-heaped with immense loads of snow, so that every hill appeared to the farmer to have changed its form. There was a thick white haze on the sky, corresponding exactly with the wan frigid colour of the high mountains, so that in casting one's eye up to the heights, it was not apparent where the limits of the earth ended, and the heavens began. There was no horizon--no blink of the sun looking through the pale and impervious mist of heaven; but there, in that elevated and sequestered _hope_, the old shepherd and his flock seemed to be left out of nature and all its sympathies, and embosomed in one interminable chamber of waste desolation.--So his master thought; and any stranger beholding the scene, would have been still more deeply impressed that the case was so in reality.