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WANDERING WILLIE'S TALE,
By Sir Walter Scott
"Honest folks like me! How do ye ken whether I am honest, or what I am?
I may be the deevil himsell for what ye ken, for he has power to come
disguised like an angel of light; and, besides, he is a prime fiddler.
He played a sonata to Corelli, ye ken."
There was something odd in this speech, and the tone in which it was
said. It seemed as if my companion was not always in his constant mind,
or that he was willing to try if he could frighten me. I laughed at the
extravagance of his language, however, and asked him in reply if he
was fool enough to believe that the foul fiend would play so silly a
masquerade.
THRAWN JANET,
By Robert Louis Stevenson
The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of
Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful
to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative
or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the
Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his
eye was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private
admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye
pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity. Many
young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the
holy communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk. He had a sermon
on I Pet. V. 8, "The devil as a roaring lion," on the Sunday after every
17th of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself upon that text
both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror of his bearing
in the pulpit. The children were frightened into fits, and the old
looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day, full of those
hints that Hamlet deprecated. The manse itself, where it stood by the
water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw overhanging it on
the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish hilltops rising toward
the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr. Soulis's ministry,
to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued themselves upon their
prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan alehouse shook their heads
together at the thought of passing late by that uncanny neighbourhood.
There was one spot, to be more particular, which was regarded with
especial awe. The manse stood between the highroad and the water
of Dule, with a gable to each; its bank was toward the kirktown of
Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a bare garden, hedged
with thorn, occupied the land between the river and the road. The
house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each. It opened not
directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or passage, giving on
the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by the tall willows
and elders that bordered on the stream. And it was this strip of
causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary so
infamous a reputation. The minister walked there often after dark,
sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and
when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring
school-boys ventured, with beating hearts, to "follow my leader" across
that legendary spot.
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