is a general and
well-grounded belief.'

'It is the resource of cheaters, knaves, and cozeners,' said Sampson.

'Abusus non tollit usum.--The abuse of anything doth not abrogate the
lawful use thereof.'

During this discussion Ellangowan was somewhat like a woodcock caught in
his own springe. He turned his face alternately from the one spokesman to
the other, and began, from the gravity with which Mannering plied his
adversary, and the learning which he displayed in the controversy, to
give him credit for being half serious. As for Meg, she fixed her
bewildered eyes upon the astrologer, overpowered by a jargon more
mysterious than her own.

Mannering pressed his advantage, and ran over all the hard terms of art
which a tenacious memory supplied, and which, from circumstances
hereafter to be noticed, had been familiar to him in early youth.

Signs and planets, in aspects sextile, quartile, trine, conjoined, or
opposite; houses of heaven, with their cusps, hours, and minutes;
almuten, almochoden, anabibazon, catabibazon; a thousand terms of equal
sound and significance, poured thick and threefold upon the unshrinking
Dominie, whose stubborn incredulity bore him out against the pelting of
this pitiless storm.

At length the joyful annunciation that the lady had presented her husband
with a fine boy, and was (of course) as well as could be expected, broke
off this intercourse. Mr. Bertram hastened to the lady's apartment, Meg
Merrilies descended to the kitchen to secure her share of the groaning
malt and the 'ken-no,' [Footnote: See Note i.] and Mannering, after
looking at his watch, and noting with great exactness the hour and minute
of the birth, requested, with becoming gravity, that the Dominie would
conduct him to some place where he might have a view of the heavenly
bodies.

The schoolmaster, without further answer, rose and threw open a door half
sashed with glass, which led to an old-fashioned terrace-walk behind the
modern house, communicating with the platform on which the ruins of the
ancient castle were situated. The wind had arisen, and swept before it
the clouds which had formerly obscured the sky. The moon was high, and at
the full, and all the lesser satellites of heaven shone forth in
cloudless effulgence. The scene which their light presented to Mannering
was in the highest degree unexpected and striking.

We have observed, that in the latter part of his journey our traveller
approached the sea-s