e ye a hand in the morning,"
could calm his anxiety. However, on looking out before going to bed, he
was comforted to find the wind coming from the south, and apparently a
thaw beginning. He might sleep in peace after all; things were going to
turn out less bad than he had feared.

Tired as he was, however, try as he might, sleep would not come that
night; an unaccountable feeling of restlessness and of vague
apprehension had him in its grip. Hour after hour he lay, listening
irritably to the snoring of his fellow-shepherd, Borthwick, starting
nervously at every scraping of rat or creak of timber. At last, long
after midnight, he rose and looked out. The wind had fallen, but snow
still fell; there was nothing abnormal in the night, and the weather
might have been described as merely "seasonable." But away in the
northern sky, low down, appeared a strange break in the mist, such as
in all his experience he had never before seen. And it came to his mind
that the previous day, when on his homeward way he had "looked in" at
his uncle's house, the old man had predicted the coming of a violent
storm, which would surely spring from that quarter in which should first
be seen a phenomenon such as that on which Hogg was now looking. The
shepherd returned to bed, and had almost succeeded in falling into a
doze, when again some impulse caused him to sit up and listen. From far
in the distant hills came quivering a strange low moaning that brought
with it something of awe and suspense. Nearer it drove, and nearer,
rising at length to a fierce bellow; and then, with appalling roar, as
of thunder, the gale hurled itself on to the building, shaking it to the
foundations. In the pitch blackness of the night Hogg groped his way to
an opening in the byre over which he and Borthwick slept, and thrust out
a hand and arm. "So completely was the air overloaded with falling and
driving snow that, but for the force of the wind, I felt as if I had
thrust my arm into a wreath of snow," he writes.

Presently he roused Borthwick, who had slept soundly through the hubbub,
and at once his fellow-shepherd dressed and tried to make his way from
the byre to the kitchen, a distance of no more than fourteen yards. But
even in the little time which had elapsed since the breaking of the
storm the space between kitchen and byre had drifted up with snow as
high as the house walls, and Borthwick straightway lost himself; neither
could he find his way to the h