Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/59

Rh As he came, he laid his bridle on his horse's neck, and leaned aside, and took at me a long, long look. The youth himself, full of life and gladness beside me, seemed to discover the resemblance between the spectre rider and himself, and it was only by throwing myself in his bosom that I hindered him from addressing the apparition. How long I remained insensible in his arms I know not, but when I recovered I found myself pressed to the youth's bosom, and a gentleman, with several armed attendants, standing beside me—all showing by their looks the deep interest they took in my fate."

Dame Eleanor Selby had concluded her account of the Spectre Horsemen of Soutra Fell, the sun had set; and the twilight, warm, silent, and dewy, had succeeded: that pleasant time, between light and dark, in which domestic labour finds a brief remission. The shepherd, returned from hill or moor, spread out his hose, moistened in morass or rivulet, before the hearth fire, which glimmered far and wide, and, taking his accustomed seat, sat mute and motionless as a figure of stone. The cows came lowing homewards from the pasture-hills; others, feeding out of cribs filled with rich moist clover, yielded their milk into a score of pails; while the ewes, folded on the sheltered side of the remote glen, submitted their udders, not without the frequent butt and bleat, to the pressure of maidens' hands. Pastoral verse has not many finer pictures than what it borrows from the shepherd returning from the hill and the shepherdess from the fold, the former with his pipe and