Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/123

Rh the hawks of heaven fight. That woman has destroyed the firstlings of the flock, has dried up the udders to the sucking lambs, and lessened the riches of men who live by sweet cheese and fattened herds. She hath also cast her spells over the deep waters of Annan and Ae; the fish have fled, and the nets of the fishermen are dipped in vain. The fowls of heaven, too, have felt the cunning of her hand; the wild swans have left the Ladye's Lowe, the wild geese have fled from the royal lakes of Lochmaben, and the blackcock and the ptarmigan come no more to the snare of the fowler. Let her therefore scream and weep under the strong hand and sharp nails of her bitter enemy. And for the other woman—even she whose husband lives on the deep waters, and to whom she bears children in the image of other men—let her, I say, suffer from the fingers of witchcraft: pleasant is the strife between workers of wickedness; and woe to the wit and sorrow to the hand that seeks to sunder them. Now, touching this singular dream of thine, I have a word to say, and it is this: believe it not—it is the work of the grand architect of human misery, who seeks to draw people to sin in the dreams and shadows of the night. To men whose hearts are warm, and whose blood is young, he descends in soft and voluptuous visions. I have myself beheld a maiden with a languishing look and an eye blue and ensnaring, standing at my bedside, clothed out in a midnight dream with the shadowy beauty of a sleeping imagination; and this appeared, too, on that very night when my inward gifts and graces had raised me from a humble sower of seed-corn to become an elder of our godly kirk—praise be blessed, and may the deed be lauded of men. But it is not alone to the staid and the devout that the enemy appears in dreams; he presents the soldier with imaginary fields of peril and blood, and blesses his ear with the yell and the outcry of battle and the trumpet sound. To the maiden he comes in gallant shapes and costly raiment, with becks and bows, and feet which pace gracefully over the floor to the sound of the flute and dulcimer, and all manner of music. To the sleeping eye of a mother he digs a deep pit for the babe of her bosom, and lays the child that sucks her breast by the side of a fathomless stream. He shows her shrouds and empty coffins, figures stretched in white linen and kirkyard processions, and raises in her ear the wail of the matrons and the lyke-wake song. Heed not