teal across the sense, it starts bewildered.

Robert played better than usual. His touch grew intense, and put on all
its delicacy, till it was like that of the spider, which, as Pope so
admirably says,

Feels at each thread, and lives along the line.

And while Ericson watched its shadows, the music must have taken hold of
him too; for when Robert ceased, he sang a wild ballad of the northern
sea, to a tune strange as itself. It was the only time Robert ever heard
him sing. Mysie's eyes grew wider and wider as she listened. When it was
over,

'Did ye write that sang yersel', Mr. Ericson?' asked Robert.

'No,' answered Ericson. 'An old shepherd up in our parts used to say it
to me when I was a boy.'

'Didna he sing 't?' Robert questioned further.

'No, he didn't. But I heard an old woman crooning it to a child in a
solitary cottage on the shore of Stroma, near the Swalchie whirlpool,
and that was the tune she sang it to, if singing it could be called.'

'I don't quite understand it, Mr. Ericson,' said Mysie. 'What does it
mean?'

'There was once a beautiful woman lived there-away,' began Ericson.--But
I have not room to give the story as he told it, embellishing it,
no doubt, as with such a mere tale was lawful enough, from his own
imagination. The substance was that a young man fell in love with a
beautiful witch, who let him go on loving her till he cared for nothing
but her, and then began to kill him by laughing at him. For no witch can
fall in love herself, however much she may like to be loved. She mocked
him till he drowned himself in a pool on the seashore. Now the witch did
not know that; but as she walked along the shore, looking for things,
she saw his hand lying over the edge of a rocky basin. Nothing is more
useful to a witch than the hand of a man, so she went to pick it up.
When she found it fast to an arm, she would have chopped it off, but
seeing whose it was, she would, for some reason or other best known to
a witch, draw off his ring first. For it was an enchanted ring which she
had given him to bewitch his love, and now she wanted both it and the
hand to draw to herself the lover of a young maiden whom she hated. But
the dead hand closed its fingers upon hers, and her power was powerless
against the dead. And the tide came rushing up, and the dead hand held
her till she was drowned. She lies with her lover to this day at the
bottom of the Swalchie whirlpool; and when a storm is at hand