Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/252

248 companionMy companion [sic] gave an involuntary shudder when he saw him—"Lo, and behold, now, here comes Gilbert the fisherman! once every twenty-four hours doth he come, let the wind and the rain be as they will, to the nightly tide, to work o'er again, in imagination, his auld tragedy of unrighteousness. See how he waves his hand, as if he welcomed some one from sea—he raises his voice, too, as if something in the water required his counsel; and see how he dashes up to the middle, and grapples with the water as if he clutched a human being!"

I looked on the old man, and heard him call, in a hollow and broken voice: "O hoy! the ship, O hoy,—turn your boat's head ashore! And, my bonnie lady, keep haud o' yere casket. Hech be't! that wave would have sunk a three-decker, let be a slender boat. See—see, an' she binna sailing aboon the water like a wild swan!" And, wading deeper in the tide as he spoke, he seemed to clutch at something with both hands, and struggle with it in the water.

"Na! na! dinna haud your white hands to me—ye wear owre mickle gowd in your hair, and o'er many diamonds on your bosom, to 'scape drowning. There's as mickle gowd in this casket as would have sunk thee seventy fathom deep." And he continued to hold his hands under the water, muttering all the while.

"She's half gane now—and I'll be a braw laird, and build a bonnie house, and gang crousely to kirk and market; now I may let the waves work their will—my work will be ta'en for theirs."

He turned to wade to the shore, but a large and heavy wave came full dash on him, and bore him off his feet, and ere any assistance reached him, all human aid was too late; for nature was so exhausted with the fulness of years, and with his exertions, that a spoonful of water would have drowned him. The body of this miserable old man was interred, after some opposition from the peasantry, beneath the wall of the kirkyard; and from that time, the Ghost with the Golden Casket was seen no more, and only continued to haunt the evening tale of the hind and the farmer.