aw Elspeth ganging yont the
double dykes, and I cried to her that the Painted Lady would do her a
mischief, but she just ran on."

Elspeth in the double dykes--alone--and at night! Oh, how Tommy would
have liked to strike himself now! She must have believed his wicked lie
after all, and being so religious she had gone to--He gave himself no
time to finish the thought. The vital thing was that she was in peril,
he seemed to hear her calling to him, "Oh, Tommy, come quick! oh, Tommy,
oh, Tommy!" and in an agony of apprehension he ran after her. But by the
time he got to the beginning of the double dykes he knew that she must
be at the end of them, and in the Painted Lady's maw, unless their
repute by night had blown her back. He paused on the Coffin Brig, which
is one long narrow stone; and along the funnel of the double dykes he
sent the lonely whisper, "Elspeth, are you there?" He tried to shout it,
but no boy could shout there after nightfall in the Painted Lady's time,
and when the words had travelled only a little way along the double
dykes, they came whining back to him, like a dog despatched on uncanny
work. He heard no other sound save the burn stealing on tiptoe from an
evil place, and the uneasy rustling of tree-tops, and his own breathing.

The Coffin Brig remains, but the double dykes have fallen bit by bit
into the burn, and the path they made safe is again as naked as when the
Kingoldrum Jacobites filed along it, and sweer they were, to the support
of the Pretender. It traverses a ridge and is streaked with slippery
beech-roots which like to fling you off your feet, on the one side into
a black burn twenty feet below, on the other down a pleasant slope. The
double dykes were built by a farmer fond of his dram, to stop the tongue
of a water-kelpie which lived in a pool below and gave him a turn every
night he staggered home by shouting, "Drunk again, Peewitbrae!" and
announcing, with a smack of the lips, that it had a bed ready for him in
the burn. So Peewitbrae built two parallel dykes two feet apart and two
feet high, between which he could walk home like a straight man. His
cunning took the heart out of the brute, and water-kelpies have not been
seen near Thrums since about that time.

By day even girls played at palaulays here, and it was a favorite resort
of boys, who knew that you were a man when you could stand on both dykes
at once. They also stripped boldly to the skin and then looked
doubtfully at