When he had taken it, he fell asleep once more, and when he woke again, it was in the middle of the night. The lamp was nearly burned out: it had a long, red, disreputable nose, that spoke of midnight hours and exhausted oil. The old lady was dozing in her chair. The clock had just struck something, for the sound of its bell was yet faintly pulsing in the air. He sat up, and looked out into the room. Something seemed upon him--he could not tell what. He felt as if something had been going on besides the striking of the clock, and were not yet over--as if something was even now being done in the room. But there the old woman slept, motionless, and apparently in perfect calm! It could not, however, have been perfect as it seemed, for presently she began to talk. At first came only broken sentences, occasionally with a long pause; and just as he had concluded she would say nothing more, she would begin again. There was something awful to the fancy of the youth in the issuing of words from the lips of one apparently unconscious of surrounding things; her voice was like the voice of one speaking from another world. Cosmo was a brave boy where duty was concerned, but conscience and imagination were each able to make him tremble. To tremble, and to turn the back, are, however, very different things: of the latter, the thing deserving to be called cowardice, Cosmo knew nothing; his hair began to rise upon his head, but that head he never hid beneath the bed-clothes. He sat and stared into the gloom, where the old woman lay in her huge chair, muttering at irregular intervals. Presently she began to talk a little more continuously. And now also Cosmo’s heart had got a little quieter, and, no longer making such a noise in his ears, allowed him to hear better. After a few words seemingly unconnected, though probably with a perfect dependence of their own, she began to murmur something that sounded like verses. Cosmo soon perceived that she was saying the same thing over and over, and at length he had not only made out every word of the few lines, but was able to remember them. This was what he afterwards recalled--by that time uncertain whether the whole thing had not been a dream: Catch yer naig an’ pu’ his tail: In his hin’ heel ca’ a nail; Rug his lugs frae ane anither-- Stan’ up, an’ ca’ the king yer brither. When first he repeated them entire to himself, the old woman still muttering them, he could not help laughing, and the noise, though repressed, yet roused her. She woke, not, like most young people, with slow gradation of consciousness, but all at once was wide awake. She sat up in her chair. “Was I snorin’, laddie, ’at ye leuch?” she asked, in a tone of slight offence. “Eh, na!” replied Cosmo. “It was only ’at ye was sayin’ something rale funny--i’ yer sleep, ye ken--a queer jingle o’ poetry it was.” Therewith he repeated the rime, and Grannie burst into a merry laugh--which however sobered rather suddenly.