Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/130

126 never grow over the body of Benjie Spedlands. He was shunned by the old and loathed by the young; and the selfish cruelty of his nature met with the singular punishment of a mental alienation, dead to all other feeling save that of agony for the death of the eight children. He wandered into all lonesome places, and sought to escape from the company of all living things. His favourite seat was on a little hill-top, which overlooks the head of the Ladye's Lowe. There he sat watching the water, with an intensity of gaze which nothing could interrupt. Sometimes he was observed to descend with the swiftness of a bird in its flight, and dash into the lake, and snatch and struggle in the water like one saving a creature from drowning. One winter evening, a twelvemonth from the day of the fatal catastrophe on the lake, he was seen to run round its bank like one in agony, stretching out his hands, and shouting to something he imagined he saw in the water. The night grew dark and stormy; the sleet fell, and thick hail came, and the winds augmented. Still his voice was heard at times far shriller than the tempest—old men shuddered at the sound—about midnight it ceased, and was never heard more. His hat was found floating by the side of the water, but he was never more seen nor heard of—his death-lights, glimmering for a season on the lake, told to many that he had found, perhaps sought, a grave in the deepest part of the Ladye's Lowe."