uerile fear, I forcibly withdrew my gaze and
concentrated it abstractedly on the ground at my feet. I then
listened, and in the rustling of a leaf, the humming of some night
insect, the whizzing of a bat, the whispering of the wind as it moaned
softly past me, I fancied--nay, I felt sure I detected something that
was not ordinary. I blew my nose, and had barely ceased marvelling at
the loudness of its reverberations, before the piercing, ghoulish
shriek of an owl sent the blood in torrents to my heart. I then
laughed, and my blood froze as I heard a chorus, of what I tried to
persuade myself could only be echoes, proceed from every crag and rock
in the valley. For some seconds after this I sat still, hardly daring
to breathe, and pretending to be extremely angry with myself for being
such a fool. With a stupendous effort I turned my attention to the
most material of things. One of the skirt buttons on my hip--they were
much in vogue then--being loose, I endeavoured to occupy myself in
tightening it, and when I could no longer derive any employment from
that, I set to work on my shoes, and tied knots in the laces, merely
to enjoy the task of untying them. But this, too, ceasing at last to
attract me, I was desperately racking my mind for some other device,
when there came again the queer, booming noise I had heard before, but
which I could now no longer doubt was the report of firearms. I looked
in the direction of the sound--and--my heart almost stopped. Racing
towards me--as if not merely for his life, but his soul--came the
figure of a Highlander. The wind rustling through his long dishevelled
hair, blew it completely over his forehead, narrowly missing his eyes,
which were fixed ahead of him in a ghastly, agonised stare. He had not
a vestige of colour, and, in the powerful glow of the moonbeams, his
skin shone livid. He ran with huge bounds, and, what added to my
terror and made me double aware he was nothing mortal, was that each
time his feet struck the hard, smooth road, upon which I could well
see there was no sign of a stone, there came the sound, the
unmistakable sound of the scattering of gravel. On, on he came, with
cyclonic swiftness; his bare sweating elbows pressed into his panting
sides; his great, dirty, coarse, hairy fists screwed up in bony
bunches in front of him; the foam-flakes thick on his clenched,
grinning lips; the blood-drops oozing down his sweating thighs. It was
all real, infernally, hideousl