Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/271

Rh the sight of a stranger breaking his bread and drinking his milk may make him die through downright vexation for the unwonted waste? Andrew, my bonnie lad, take this strange man up to auld Warlsworm's hall-door; I would gang myself, but I vowed never to cross his threshold or enter his land, since he cheated my ain cousin out of the green holms of Dee: black be his cast, and bitter his doom!"

A little boy came to my side, and put his hand in mine; and, willing to know more of a man of whom I had heard so much, away I walked with my barefooted guide, and soon came within sight of the mansion of Warlsworm.

It was a rough old house, built of undressed granite, and covered with a slating of coarse sandstone. The smoke, despairing to find its way through the windings of a chimney almost choked with sides of bacon and soot, sought its passage in many a curl and turn along the roof, and, finally descending, streamed out into the pure air through window and door. Groups of black cattle, after browsing on every green thing which the garden contained, and trying to digest the withered thatch which depended from the sides of the barn and stable, stood lowing knee-deep in a pool of muddy water before the mansion, and looking wistfully on the green hills and the golden harvest around them. The fowls, undismayed by foumart or fox, plundered the corn which hung drop-ripe and unreaped in the field; while a multitude of swine, breaking, in the desperation of hunger, from their pens, ran grunting through the standing grain, crushed the growing potatoes in unwieldy joy, and finally cooled their sides, and fulfilled the Scripture proverb, by wallowing in the mire which encompassed as with a fosse this miserable mansion.

The door stood open. In summer, in the pastoral districts, few doors are closed; and, with the privilege which a stranger claims in a hospitable land, I entered the house. Wheeled towards the fire, and bedded thick with sheepskins and soft cushions, stood the lang settle, or rustic sofa; and on it lay a man bald and feeble with age, and kneeling by his side I saw a fair-haired girl, her hands clasped, and her large blue eyes fixed with a moist and motionless gaze on his face. This was the owner of the mansion, the far-famed Laird of Warlsworm; and the maid was his niece, as remarkable for her gentleness and beauty as her relative for his grasping and incessant greed. As my shadow darkened the