n; 'you are a dead man if ye had as mony lives as hairs.'
Brown eagerly looked round for some weapon of defence. There was none
near. He then rushed to the door with the intention of plunging among the
trees, and making his escape by flight from what he now esteemed a den of
murderers, but Merrilies held him with a masculine grasp. 'Here,' she
said, 'here, be still and you are safe; stir not, whatever you see or
hear, and nothing shall befall you.'

Brown, in these desperate circumstances, remembered this woman's
intimation formerly, and thought he had no chance of safety but in
obeying her. She caused him to couch down among a parcel of straw on the
opposite side of the apartment from the corpse, covered him carefully,
and flung over him two or three old sacks which lay about the place.
Anxious to observe what was to happen, Brown arranged as softly as he
could the means of peeping from under the coverings by which he was
hidden, and awaited with a throbbing heart the issue of this strange and
most unpleasant adventure. The old gipsy in the meantime set about
arranging the dead body, composing its limbs, and straighting the arms by
its side. 'Best to do this,' she muttered, 'ere he stiffen.' She placed
on the dead man's breast a trencher, with salt sprinkled upon it, set one
candle at the head and another at the feet of the body, and lighted both.
Then she resumed her song, and awaited the approach of those whose voices
had been heard without.

Brown was a soldier, and a brave one; but he was also a man, and at this
moment his fears mastered his courage so completely that the cold drops
burst out from every pore. The idea of being dragged out of his miserable
concealment by wretches whose trade was that of midnight murder, without
weapons or the slightest means of defence, except entreaties, which would
be only their sport, and cries for help, which could never reach other
ear than their own; his safety entrusted to the precarious compassion of
a being associated with these felons, and whose trade of rapine and
imposture must have hardened her against every human feeling--the
bitterness of his emotions almost choked him. He endeavoured to read in
her withered and dark countenance, as the lamp threw its light upon her
features, something that promised those feelings of compassion which
females, even in their most degraded state, can seldom altogether
smother. There was no such touch of humanity about this woman. The
in