osition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible. At
one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl, she
flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned; at
another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with what
seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to his
pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh, he drew out, and found to be
merely a handful of slate shivers. On yet another occasion, the man,
when passing on horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck
from behind the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the
thicket, he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband
she never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice
echoing from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold,
unnatural laugh.

One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was
surprised to see her enter the cottage; as all her previous visits had
been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas
now,--though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain
had just broken out,--still it _was_ day. "Mammie," she said, "I cannot
open the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you;
but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the White
House [that of a neighboring proprietor], and tell the folk there to set
out with all the speed of man and horse for the black rock in the sea,
at the foot of the crags, or they'll rue it dearly to their dying day.
Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the tide
has flowed around them; and, if no help reach them soon, they'll be all
scattered like sea-ware on the shore ere the fall of the sea. But if you
go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will be
safe for an hour to come, and there will be something done by their
mother to better you, for the news." The woman went, as directed, and
told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback in
hot haste for the rock,--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on a
solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut out
from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices, and
covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge of the
cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described, surrounded by
the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags. Bu