e word of her lip and the glance of her eye.

She mutter'd the spell of Swithin bold,
When his naked foot traced the midnight wold,
When he stopp'd the Hag as she rode the night,
And bade her descend, and her promise plight.

He that dare sit on Saint Swithin's Chair,
When the Night-Hag wings the troubled air,
Questions three, when he speaks the spell,
He may ask, and she must tell.

The Baron has been with King Robert his liege
These three long years in battle and siege;
News are there none of his weal or his woe,
And fain the Lady his fate would know.

She shudders and stops as the charm she speaks;--
Is it the moody owl that shrieks?
Or is it that sound, betwixt laughter and scream,
The voice of the Demon who haunts the stream?

The moan of the wind sunk silent and low,
And the roaring torrent had ceased to flow;
The calm was more dreadful than raging storm,
When the cold grey mist brought the ghastly Form!

'I am sorry to disappoint the company, especially Captain Waverley, who
listens with such laudable gravity; it is but a fragment, although I
think there are other verses, describing the return of the Baron from the
wars, and how the lady was found "clay-cold upon the grounsill ledge.'"

'It is one of those figments,' observed Mr. Bradwardine, 'with which the
early history of distinguished families was deformed in the times of
superstition; as that of Rome, and other ancient nations, had their
prodigies, sir, the which you may read in ancient histories, or in the
little work compiled by Julius Obsequens, and inscribed by the learned
Scheffer, the editor, to his patron, Benedictus Skytte, Baron of
Dudershoff.'

'My father has a strange defiance of the marvellous, Captain Waverley,'
observed Rose, 'and once stood firm when a whole synod of Presbyterian
divines were put to the rout by a sudden apparition of the foul fiend.'

Waverley looked as if desirous to hear more.

'Must I tell my story as well as sing my song? Well--Once upon a time
there lived an old woman, called Janet Gellatley, who was suspected to be
a witch, on the infallible grounds that she was very old, very ugly, very
poor, and had two sons, one of whom was a poet and the other a fool,
which visitation, all the neighbourhood agreed, had come upon her for the
sin of witchcraft. And she was imprisoned for