Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/241

Rh "Bonnie lady, bonnie lady," said he, in a soothing tone, "it canna be, it mauna be—hinnie! hinnie! What would become of my three bonnie grandbairns, made fatherless and mitherless by that false flood afore us, if they supped milk and tasted butter that came from the greensward of this doomed and unblessed spot?"

The animal appeared to comprehend something in her own way from the speech of her owner; she abated her resistance, and, indulging only in a passing glance at the rich deep herbage, passed on to her destined pasture.

I had often heard of the singular superstitions of the Scottish peasantry, and that every hillock had its song, every hill its ballad, and every valley its tale. I followed with my eye the old man and his cow; he went but a little way, till, seating himself on the ground, retaining still the tether in his hand, he said: "Now, bonnie lady, feast thy fill on this good greensward—it is halesome and holy compared to the sward at the doomed cottage of auld Gibbie Gyrape. Leave that to smugglers' nags: Willie o' Brandyburn and Roaring Jock o' Kempstane will ca' the haunted ha' a hained bit—they are godless fearnoughts." I looked at the person of the peasant: he was a stout hale old man, with a weather-beaten face, furrowed something by time, and perhaps by sorrow. Though summer was at its warmest he wore a broad chequered mantle, fastened at the bosom with a skewer of steel, a broad bonnet, from beneath the circumference of which straggled a few thin locks as white as driven snow, shining like amber and softer than the finest flax, while his legs were warmly cased in blue-ribbed boot-hose. Having laid his charge to the grass, he looked leisurely around him, and espying me—a stranger, and dressed above the manner of the peasantry—he acknowledged my presence by touching his bonnet; and, as if willing to communicate something of importance, he struck the tether stake in the ground and came to the old garden fence.

Wishing to know the peasant's reasons for avoiding the ruins, I thus addressed him: "This is a pretty spot, my aged friend, and the herbage looks so fresh and abundant that I would advise thee to bring thy charge hither; and while she continued to browze I would gladly listen to the history of thy white locks, for they seem to have been bleached in many tempests."

"Ay, ay," said the peasant, shaking his white head