“I’m wearing awa, bairns and neebours,” he said, “and it vexes me sair that that wretched bodie should see me going afore him. Mind, Jock, that ye’ll build the dike, and make it heigh, heigh, and stobbie on the top; and oh! keep him out o’ my lykewake, for should he but step in at the door, I’ll rise, Jock, frae the verra straiking-board, and do murder! Dinna let him so muckle as look on my coffin. I have been pondering a’ this day about the meeting at Navity, and the march-stanes; and I’ll tell you, Jock, how we’ll match him. Bury me ayont the saint’s dike on the Navity side, and dinna lay me deep. Ye ken the bonny green hillock, spreckled o’er wi’ gowans and puddock-flowers--bury me there, Jock; and yoursel’, and the auld wife, may just, when your hour comes, tak up your places beside me. We’ll a’ get up at the first tout--the ane helping the other; and I’se wad a I’m worth i’ the warld, we’ll be half-way up at Navity afore the shochlan, short-legged bodie wins o’er the dike.” Such was the dying injunction of Sandy Wood: and his tombstone still remains to testify that it was religiously attended to. An Englishman who came to reside in the parish, nearly an age after, and to whom the story must have been imparted in a rather imperfect manner, was shocked by what he deemed his unfair policy. The litigants, he said, should start together; he was certain it would be so in England where a fair field was all that would be given to St. Dunstan himself though he fought with the devil. And that it might be so here, he buried the tombstone of Wood in an immense heap of clay and gravel. It would keep him down, he said, until the little fellow would have clambered over the wall. The town’s-folk, however, who were better acquainted with the merits of the case, shovelled the heap aside; and it now forms two little hillocks which overtop the stone, and which, from the nature of the soil, are still more scantily covered with verdure than any part of the surrounding bank. CHAPTER XV. “Oh! I do ponder with most strange delight On the calm slumbers of the dead-man’s night.” HENRY K. WHITE. [Sidenote: THE POOR LOST LAD.] We have lingered long in the solitary burying-ground of St. Regulus; the sun hastens to its setting; and the slanting beam of red light that comes pouring in through an opening amid the trees, catches but the extreme tops of the loftier monuments, and the higher pinnacles of the ruin beyond. There is a little bird chirping among the graves; we may hear the hum of the bee as it speeds homeward, and the low soothing murmur of the stream in the dell below; all else is stillness and solitude in this field of the dead.