Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/58

54 for we all knew what the apparition foreboded—a lost battle and a ruined cause. I heard my father say that the like sight appeared on Helvellyn-side before the battle of Marston Moor, with this remarkable difference: the leader wore on his head the semblance of a royal crown, whereas the leaders of the troop whom I beheld wore only earls' coronets.

Now, his right hand protect us!' said the dame of Wilton Hall. 'What are we doomed to endure?—what will follow this?' 'Misery to many,' answered the pedlar, 'and sudden and early death to some who are present.' 'Cease thy croak, thou northern raven!' said Walter Selby; 'if they are phantoms, let them pass—what care we for men of mist? And if they are flesh and bone, as I guess by their bearing they must surely be, they are good gallant soldiers of our good king, and thus do I bid them welcome with my bugle.' He winded his horn till the mountain echoed far and wide; the spectre horsemen, distant nearly a quarter of a mile, seemed to halt; and the youth had his horn again at his lips to renew the note, when he was interrupted by the pedlar, who, laying his hand on the instrument, said: 'Young gentleman, be wise, and be ruled; yon vision is sent for man's instruction, not for his scoff and his scorn.' The shadowy troop now advanced, and passed toward the south at the distance of a hundred yards. I looked on them as they went, and I imagined I knew the forms of many living men—doomed speedily to perish in the battle field or on the scaffold. I saw the flower of the Jacobite chivalry—the Maxwells, the Gordons, the Boyds, the Drummonds, the Ogilvys, the Camerons, the Scotts, the Foresters, and the Selbys. The havoc which happened among these noble names it is needless to relate: it is written in tale, related in ballad, sung in song; and, deeper still it is written in family feeling and national sympathy. A supernatural light accompanied this pageant, and rendered perfectly visible horse and man: in the rear I saw a form that made me shudder; a form still present to my eye and impressed upon my heart, old and sorrow-worn as it is, as vividly as in early youth. I saw the shape of Walter Selby—his short cloak, his scarlet dress, his hat and feather, his sword by his side; and that smiling glance in his deep dark eye which was never there but for me, and which I could know among the looks of a thousand thousand.