on with all the force of monkish rhetoric, and
described, in the most frightful colours, the real character and person
of the apparently lovely Naiad, whom he hesitated not to denounce as
a limb of the kingdom of darkness. The lover listened with obstinate
incredulity; and it was not until worn out by the obstinacy of the
anchoret that he consented to put the state and condition of his
mistress to a certain trial, and for that purpose acquiesced in
Zachary's proposal that on their next interview the vespers bell
should be rung half an hour later than usual. The hermit maintained
and bucklered his opinion, by quotations from Malleus Malificarum,
Sprengerus, Remigius, and other learned demonologists, that the Evil
One, thus seduced to remain behind the appointed hour, would assume her
true shape, and, having appeared to her terrified lover as a fiend of
hell, would vanish from him in a flash of sulphurous lightning. Raymond
of Ravenswood acquiesced in the experiment, not incurious concerning
the issue, though confident it would disappoint the expectations of the
hermit.

At the appointed hour the lovers met, and their interview was protracted
beyond that at which they usually parted, by the delay of the priest
to ring his usual curfew. No change took place upon the nymph's outward
form; but as soon as the lengthening shadows made her aware that the
usual hour of the vespers chime was passed, she tore herself from her
lover's arms with a shriek of despair, bid him adieu for ever, and,
plunging into the fountain, disappeared from his eyes. The bubbles
occasioned by her descent were crimsoned with blood as they arose,
leading the distracted Baron to infer that his ill-judged curiosity
had occasioned the death of this interesting and mysterious being. The
remorse which he felt, as well as the recollection of her charms, proved
the penance of his future life, which he lost in the battle of Flodden
not many months after. But, in memory of his Naiad, he had previously
ornamented the fountain in which she appeared to reside, and secured its
waters from profanation or pollution by the small vaulted building of
which the fragments still remained scattered around it. From this period
the house of Ravenswood was supposed to have dated its decay.

Such was the generally-received legend, which some, who would seem
wiser than the vulgar, explained as obscurely intimating the fate of a
beautiful maid of plebeian rank, the mistress of th