reast; and, as she sat, she sang the
wild and melancholy dirge that has been mentioned. The burden of the
strain was "Childless!--childless!--childless!" And again it waxed
louder, and a prayer for vengeance was wildly sung. She sat and
continued her dirge, regardless of their presence, and appeared as
though she saw them not. The tears gathered in the eyes of Mr.
Cunningham, as he listened to her dark words, and his limbs shook with a
trembling motion.

"Take her into the house," said he, "and give her food and shelter for
the night. If my poor boy yet live, he may be now perishing, with none
to shelter him."

At his mention of his lost son, her wild strain suddenly ceased. She
started to her feet; and, as she fixed upon him her haggard features,
while her grey hairs and the many-coloured rags that covered her waved
in the stormy wind, she seemed as though she were not an inhabitant of
the earth, but rather the demon of the storm.

"Ha! ha! ha!" she cried, with a hideous laugh, that made the beholders
and the hearers shudder; "shelter from you!--the murderer of my
brother!--of my husband!--of my children!--of my seven fair sons!--you
that have made me childless! Back to thy dwelling, dog; and, if it will
add another drop of torturing anxiety to your soul, to know that your
son lives, and that you shall see him, but never know him--learn that he
does live! He lives!"

"Where, woman?--where?" exclaimed the wretched father.

She hastily dashed a sort of lantern from the hand of the servant who
held it, and, rushing from the shed towards the open fields, again
laughed more dismally than before, and cried, "Where? She whom you have
made childless, leaves that _where_ to torture you for ever!"

The wretched father rushed after her; but, in the darkness, the noise,
and tempest of the night, it was impossible to trace in what direction
she had fled. As every reader must be already aware, the strange and
fearful-looking woman was Barbara Moor, the widowed and childless
mother. The words which she had spoken, regarding his son being yet
alive, increased the anxious misery of Walter Cunningham. It caused his
wounds, the anguish of which time had in some degree abated, to bleed
afresh. At one time he doubted, and at another he believed, the words
which the seeming maniac had uttered; and he made journeys to many
places, in the hope of again meeting her, and of extorting from her a
confession where he should find his son, or