whose faintest echoes would have been recognised by the lover within; “steek too the door an’ lock it;--it’s a foolish conceit.” The door was accordingly locked, and Alaster left to find his way out in the manner he had entered. [Sidenote: THE EXTINCT SPECTRES.] It was late that night before he returned from the cottage to which, after leaving the kiln, he had gone. Next day he saw his mistress. She by no means exhibited her most amiable phase of character, for she was cold and distant, and not a little cross. In short, it was evident she had a quarrel with destiny. This mood, however, soon changed for the one natural to her; years passed away, and suitor after suitor was rejected by the maiden, until, in her twenty-fourth year, Alaster Macculloch paid her his addresses. He was not then a little herd-boy, but a tall, handsome, young man of nineteen, who, active and faithful, was intrusted by his master with the sole management of his farm. A belief in destiny often becomes a destiny of itself; and it became such to Alaster’s mistress. How could the predestined husband be other than a successful lover? In a few weeks they were married; and when the old man was gathered to his fathers, his son-in-law succeeded to his well-stocked farm. There are a few other traditions of this northern part of the country--some of them so greatly dilapidated by the waste of years, that they exist as mere fragments--which bear the palpable impress of a pagan or semi-pagan origin. I have heard imperfectly-preserved stories of a lady dressed in green, and bearing a goblin child in her arms, who used to wander in the night-time from cottage to cottage, when all the inhabitants were asleep. She would raise the latch, it is said, take up her place by the fire, fan the embers into a flame, and then wash her child in the blood of the youngest inmate of the cottage, who would be found dead next morning. There was another wandering green lady, her contemporary, of exquisite beauty and a majestic carriage, who was regarded as the Genius of the smallpox, and who, when the disease was to terminate fatally, would be seen in the grey of the morning, or as the evening was passing into night, sitting by the bedside of her victim. I have heard wild stories, too, of an unearthly, squalid-looking thing, somewhat in the form of a woman, that used to enter farmhouses during the day, when all the inmates, except perhaps a solitary female, were engaged in the fields. More than a century ago, it is said to have entered, in the time of harvest, the house of a farmer of Navity, who had lost nearly all his cattle by disease a few weeks before. The farmer’s wife, the only inmate at the time, was engaged at the fireside in cooking for the reapers; the goblin squatted itself beside her, and shivering, as if with cold, raised its dingy, dirty-looking vestments over its knees. “Why, ye nasty thing,” said the woman, “hae ye killed a’ our cattle?”--“An’ why,” inquired the goblin