, an' the Mandrake
that cries like a murdered bairn when ye pu' it frae the moss. See ye
here, there's three dead bairns aneath that hearthstane. Gin ye like I
will let ye see the banes. She didna pit me there, for the deil's wife
has aye a warm side to the deil's bairn. Sit ye doon and bide a wee.
It's braw an' heartsome to see a face at Willie's Shiel in the howe o'
the Eglin."

After the first horrid surprise of coming in upon such a place, I saw
that the thing after all was human--an idiot or natural as I judged,
with a monstrous twisted body and strange elricht voice like the crying
of the night-wind in a keyhole. But I thought it best to sit down on a
seat, even as he bade me, and so I drew a creepie stool carelessly
nearer to me with one hand.

"Na, dinna sit on that--that's a stool that naebody can sit on but my
mither."

And when I looked at the creepie in the red firelight, for it felt
strange to my hand, lo! it was formed of three skulls set close
together, and the legs of it were of men's leg bones.

Then it flashed to my mind that I had chanced on the house of Corp-licht
Kate, the witch wife of the Star, who for many years dwelt alone on the
flowe of the Eglin, with only her idiot son with her for company.

"Na," said the object, "nane can sit on that creepie but the minnie o'
me--Corp-licht Kate o' the Star. It's weel for me, an' it's weel for
you, that my minnie's no' here the nicht. But sit ye down and tak' your
rest."

I arose to flee, but the monstrous figure by the red fire waved me down.
And I declare that as I looked at him, he seemed to swell and glow with
a kind of brightness like the moon through mist. He waved his arms
abroad, and immediately about me there began the most affrighting
turmoil. Black forms that had been crouching in the corners came out and
began to circle round us, as it appeared by some devilish cantrip,
skimming round the house breast-high, without ever touching the floor or
the walls. They seemed like an army of cats, black and unearthly, all
flying in mid air, screeching and caterwauling as at a witch's festival.
I began to wonder if the foul, human-headed, toad-like thing that
squatted by the fire were indeed the black master of witches himself, to
whom, for my sins, I had been delivered in the flesh before my time.

But with a wave of his hand the idiot stilled the turmoil, and the
flitting demons came to the ground in the shape of a dozen or so of
cats, black and