rs. Ravenswood conceived it his duty
to gratify this predilection, commonly found to exist among the Scottish
peasantry, and despatched Babie to the neighbouring village to procure
the assistance of some females, assuring her that, in the mean while, he
would himself remain with the dead body, which, as in Thessaly of old,
it is accounted highly unfit to leave without a watch.

Thus, in the course of a quarter of an hour or little more, he found
himself sitting a solitary guard over the inanimate corpse of her whose
dismissed spirit, unless his eyes had strangely deceived him, had so
recently manifested itself before him. Notwithstanding his natural
courage, the Master was considerably affected by a concurrence of
circumstances so extraordinary. "She died expressing her eager desire
to see me. Can it be, then," was his natural course of reflection--"can
strong and earnest wishes, formed during the last agony of nature,
survive its catastrophe, surmount the awful bounds of the spiritual
world, and place before us its inhabitants in the hues and colouring of
life? And why was that manifested to the eye which could not unfold its
tale to the ear? and wherefore should a breach be made in the laws
of nature, yet its purpose remain unknown? Vain questions, which only
death, when it shall make me like the pale and withered form before me,
can ever resolve."

He laid a cloth, as he spoke, over the lifeless face, upon whose
features he felt unwilling any longer to dwell. He then took his place
in an old carved oaken chair, ornamented with his own armorial bearings,
which Alice had contrived to appropriate to her own use in the pillage
which took place among creditors, officers, domestics, and messengers of
the law when his father left Ravenswood Castle for the last time. Thus
seated, he banished, as much as he could, the superstitious feelings
which the late incident naturally inspired. His own were sad enough,
without the exaggeration of supernatural terror, since he found himself
transferred from the situation of a successful lover of Lucy Ashton, and
an honoured and respected friend of her father, into the melancholy
and solitary guardian of the abandoned and forsaken corpse of a common
pauper.

He was relieved, however, from his sad office sooner that he could
reasonably have expected, considering the distance betwixt the hut of
the deceased and the village, and the age and infirmities of three old
women who came from the