Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/35

Rh nearly an hour. His way lay near the little lonely primrose bank, and as he walked along he heard the whispering of tongues: he deemed it some idle piece of love-making, and he approached to see who they might be. He saw what ought not to be seen, even the reverend Ezra seated on the bank and conversing with a buxom young dame and a strange one. They were talking wondrous kindly. He observed them for a little space: the young dame was in widow's weeds; the mariner's widow wore the only weeds, praise be blest, in the parish; but she was a raven to a swan compared to the quean who conversed with the minister. She was indeed passing fair, and the longer he looked on her she became the lovelier—owre lovely for mere flesh and blood. His dog shrunk back and whimpered, and an owl that chased a bird in the grove uttered a scream of terror as it beheld her, and forsook its prey. At length she turned the light of her eyes on himself; Will wi' the Wisp was but a proverb to them: they had a glance he should never get the better of, and he hardly thought his legs carried him home, he flew with such supernatural speed.

"But, indeed," added the cautious peasant, "I have some doubts that the whole was a fiction of the Auld Enemy, to make me think ill of the douce man and the godly; and if he be spared to come home, so shall I tell him. But if Ezra, pious man, is heard of nae mair, I shall be free to believe that what I heard I heard, and what I saw I saw. And Josiah, man, I may as weel give ye the benefit of my own opinion. I'll amaist aver on my Bible, that the minister, a daring man and a courageous—owre courageous, I doubt—has been dared out to the lonely place by some he- or maybe she-fiend—the latter maist likely; and there he has been overcome by might or temptation, and now Satan may come atween the stilts of the Gospel plough, for the right hand of Ezra will hold it no longer; or I should nae wonder," said the peasant, "but that the old dour persecutor Bonshaw has carried him away on his fiend steed Geordie Johnstone—conscience, nought more likely—and I'll warrant even now they are ducking him in the dub of perdition, or picking his banes ahint the hallan o' hell."

The whole of this rustic prediction was not fulfilled. In a little deep wild dell, at the distance of a gunshot, they found Ezra Peden lying on the ground, uttering words which will be pardoned, since they were the words of a delirious