The youth looked inquiringly in the face of the bluegown; but the same expression was still there. He was sorely puzzled: the feelings of humanity were throbbing in his heart in audible pulses. The old beggar was in one of his humours, and held him by the skirt of his coat as he attempted to rise, while at the very moment, as he imagined, a human being was perishing in the waters. He sat breathless, with his ear chained to the abyss, and his eye searching in vain for some traces of meaning in the face of his arch companion. The same hushed stillness pervaded the scene of dreary desolation; neither the sound of a death-struggle nor of living motion could be distinguished, and it was as difficult to account for an individual endowed with life and the desire of self-preservation drowning without a sigh or groan, as it was for the sudden disappearance of every trace of a still living being in the dismal abyss into which he had so mysteriously descended. "It's a' owra now, at ony rate, Master Henry!" said the bluegown, adding to the youth's perplexity by a hint so directly opposed to his prior confidence, "the deil mair o' a sound comes frae earth, water, or air, than that croak o' a raven that even now flew o'er the quarry loch. We'll e'en be seeking hame, I think. I hae back to the road to Pittenweem to gae, and ye've a mile a-gate between ye and Riddlestain. Gude e'en to ye!" And, without even troubling himself to look over the quarry brink, the beadsman began his ordinary half-trotting pace; and in a short time Henry saw him, in the distance, making rapid progress over the heath. Meanwhile he was himself at a loss what to think or what to do. The strange manner of the beadsman led him at one time to suppose that he was satisfied that no misfortune had occurred to the inhabitant of the quarry; and at another, his parting words, joined to the inexplicable disappearance of the extraordinary individual, inclined him to an opposite belief, and filled him with painful feelings of self-crimination for not having rendered a timely assistance in behalf of a fellow-creature. He could not yet move himself from the spot. Placing himself on his breast, he looked over the brink of the chasm, gazing through between the trees on the deep, sullen pool, which, like a sleeping monster, satiated with prey, lay as still as death. His ears were not less occupied: for a space, not less than half-an-hour, he lay in this position, without seeing or hearing the slightest indication of anything that might solve the mystery. He was enveloped in the gloom of his own personal experiences of the day. The thoughts of the calcinated corpse of Hamilton, and the speaking spirit of the wild place where he lay, all combined with the painful feelings of the inquiry in which he was engaged to render his mind susceptible of morbid influences, and fecundative of supernatural creations of awe. He resolved frequently to