Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/235

Rh maid on Annanbank,' said John Stroudwater, the Cameronian, who, scorning to mingle in the dance himself, yet could endure to be a witness of youthful folly where the liquor was plenty; 'she's a bonnie quean; yet I cannot say I like to see the light which comes from her eyes, as if it were shed from two stars; nor love I to hearken the vain and wanton sound which she causeth the planed floor to utter, as she directeth her steps to the strange outcry of that man's instrument of wood, called by the profane a fiddle.' Nor were the women without their remarks on the bride's mirth on this unhappy night. 'I protest,' said an old dame in a black hood, 'against all this profane minstrelsy and dancing; it is more sinful in its nature than strong drink—I wish good may come of it!' and she paused to moisten her lips with a cup of brandy, to which a piece of sugar and a single teaspoonful of water had communicated the lady-like name of cordial. 'I wish, I say, good may come of it: I have not danced these thirty years and three, but the bride is dancing as if this night was her last. I fear she is fey.'

"If the bride and bridegroom were blithe, there was another sad enough: even poor Judith, who, retiring from the mirth and the dancing, went to her father's mill-door, and seating herself on a broken mill-stone, and loosing her locks from the comb, let them fall like a shroud around her, while she gazed intent and silent upon Annanwater, which lay still and clear in the setting light of the moon. I had an early regard for this unhappy maid—we were school-fellows and play-fellows; and, though her temper was wayward, and her mind, equal to the hardest task one week, was unequal for any kind of learning another; yet, from the frequency of these remarkable fits of impulse and ability, she became one of the finest scholars in Annandale. So I went out into the open air, and found her sitting silent and melancholy, and looking with a fixed and undeviating gaze on the river, which glittered a good half-mile distant. I stood beside her, and sought rather to learn what oppressed her spirit, from her actions and her looks, than by questioning her. It has been remarked that on ordinary occasions, though she is talkative and fond of singing snatches of songs, yet, when the secret of any coming calamity is communicated to her spirit, she becomes at once silent and gloomy, and seeks to acquaint mankind with the disaster awaiting them by sensible signs and tokens—a kind of hieroglyphic mode of communication