his head, and makes a cloud o' uneasiness, as it
were, sit upon his brow. When I saw that I would have to keep him, I
didna ken what name to gie him; but after consulting wi' my friends and
the clergyman o' the parish, it was agreed that he should bear the
surname o' wur family, and my faither's Christian name; so we called him
Patrick Reed. But the daft awd wife came upon him one day amang the
hills, and she pretended to look on his brow, and read the lines on his
hand, and tald him, frae them, that Patrick Reed wasna his real name,
but he would find it out some day--that he was born to be rich, though
he might never be rich--and that he had an awd grey-haired faither that
was mourning for him night and day, and that he had adopted the son of a
relation to be his heir. When he came home he was greatly troubled, but
he was too open-hearted to conceal from me, or from Anne, the cause of
his uneasiness; and when he had tould us a' that the mad awd wife had
said, I tried to laugh him out o' thinking about it, and bade him bring
the bottle and take a glass like a man, and never mind it. But Patrick
was nae drinker; and he gravely said to me, that the face o' the
half-daft woman came owre his brain like a confused dream--that he had
something like a remembrance of what she had said; and he also thought
that he remembered having seen her. I wish the witch had been in the
bottom o' the sea ere she met wi' him; for ever syne then--though Anne
and he are as kind and as loving as ever--he isna half the lad that he
used to be; and there is nae getting him now to take a game at
onything--though he could beat everybody--for either love or money."

Such was one of the stories which rough, honest, fear-nothing Sandy
Reed told, in relating his adventures. Now, it came to pass, when
Patrick, the foundling of whom he has spoken, had been sheltered beneath
his roof for the space of seventeen years, that Sandy, having introduced
the cultivation of turnips upon the lowlands of his farm, proposed to go
to Whitsome fair, to purchase cattle to fatten with them, and also sheep
from the Lammermuirs to eat them on the ground. He was now more than
threescore, and he was less capable of long journeys than he had been;
and he requested that his adopted son Patrick, who was also to be his
son-in-law, should accompany him; and it was agreed that they should set
out for Whitsome together.

But, on the evening before their departure, as the maiden Anne