Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/115

Rh veil she sought to conceal a face where early grief had bleached the roses and impressed a sedate and settled sorrow on a brow particularly white and high. But her eye still retained something of the light of early life, which darkened or brightened as the joys, the sufferings, or the sorrows of wedded and maternal love gave a deeper interest or passion to her story.

"When woman is young," said she, with a sigh, but not of regret, "she loves to walk in the crowded streets and near the dwellings of men; when she becomes wiser, has seen the vanities and drunk of the miseries and woes of life, she chooses her walks in more lonely places, and, seeking converse with her spirit, shuns the joy and the mirth of the world. When sorrow, which misses few, had found me out, and made me a mateless bird, I once walked out to the margin of that beautiful sheet of water, the Ladye's Lowe. It was the heart of summer; the hills in which the lake lay embosomed were bright and green; sheep were scattered upon their sides; shepherds sat on their summits; while the grassy sward, descending to the quiet pure water, gave it so much of its own vernal hue that the eye could not always distinguish where the land and lake met. Its long green water-flags and broad lilies, which lay so fiat and so light along the surface, were unmoved, save by the course of a pair of wild swans, which for many years had grazed on the grassy margin or found food in the bottom of the lake.

"This pastoral quietness pertained more to modern than to ancient times. When the summer heat was high, and the waters of the lake low, the remains of a broken but narrow causeway, composed of square stones indented in a frame-work of massy oak, might still be traced, starting from a little bay on the northern side, and diving directly towards the centre of the lake. Tradition, in pursuing the history of this causeway, supplied the lake with an island, the island with a tower, and the tower with narratives of perils and bloodshed, and chivalry and love. These fireside traditions, varying according to the fancy of the peasantry, all concluded in a story too wild for ordinary belief. A battle is invariably described by some grey-headed narrator, fought on the southern side of the lake, and sufficiently perilous and bloody. A lady's voice is heard and a lady's form is seen among the armed men, in the middle of the