you should in return have
some confidence in me; I wish to know where you are leading us.'

'There's but ae answer to that, Henry Bertram,' said the sibyl. 'I swore
my tongue should never tell, but I never said my finger should never
show. Go on and meet your fortune, or turn back and lose it: that's a' I
hae to say.'

'Go on then,' answered Bertram; 'I will ask no more questions.'

They descended into the glen about the same place where Meg had formerly
parted from Bertram. She paused an instant beneath the tall rock where he
had witnessed the burial of a dead body and stamped upon the ground,
which, notwithstanding all the care that had been taken, showed vestiges
of having been recently moved. 'Here rests ane,' she said; 'he'll maybe
hae neibours sune.'

She then moved up the brook until she came to the ruined hamlet, where,
pausing with a look of peculiar and softened interest before one of the
gables which was still standing, she said in a tone less abrupt, though
as solemn as before, 'Do you see that blackit and broken end of a
sheeling? There my kettle boiled for forty years; there I bore twelve
buirdly sons and daughters. Where are they now? where are the leaves that
were on that auld ash tree at Martinmas! The west wind has made it bare;
and I'm stripped too. Do you see that saugh tree? it's but a blackened
rotten stump now. I've sate under it mony a bonnie summer afternoon, when
it hung its gay garlands ower the poppling water. I've sat there, and,'
elevating her voice, 'I've held you on my knee, Henry Bertram, and sung
ye sangs of the auld barons and their bloody wars. It will ne'er be green
again, and Meg Merrilies will never sing sangs mair, be they blythe or
sad. But ye'll no forget her, and ye'll gar big up the auld wa's for her
sake? And let somebody live there that's ower gude to fear them of
another warld. For if ever the dead came back amang the living, I'll be
seen in this glen mony a night after these crazed banes are in the
mould.'

The mixture of insanity and wild pathos with which she spoke these last
words, with her right arm bare and extended, her left bent and shrouded
beneath the dark red drapery of her mantle, might have been a study
worthy of our Siddons herself. 'And now,' she said, resuming at once the
short, stern, and hasty tone which was most ordinary to her, 'let us to
the wark, let us to the wark.'

She then led the way to the promontory on which the Kaim of Derncleugh
was sit