s upon it, the scene of my adventure with
Wandering Willie, and of the fancied murder. I had scarcely thought of
either until the shadows had begun to fall long, and now in the night,
when all was shadow, both reflections made it horrible. Besides, if
Missy should get into the bog! But she knew better than that, wild as
her mood was. She avoided it, and galloped past, but bore me to a far
more frightful goal, suddenly dropping into a canter, and then
standing stock-still.

It was a cottage half in ruins, occupied by an old woman whom I dimly
recollected having once gone with my father to see--a good many years
ago, as it appeared to me now. She was still alive, however, very old,
and bedridden. I recollected that from the top of her wooden bed hung
a rope for her to pull herself up by when she wanted to turn, for she
was very rheumatic, and this rope for some cause or other had filled
me with horror. But there was more of the same sort. The cottage had
once been a smithy, and the bellows had been left in its place. Now
there is nothing particularly frightful about a pair of bellows,
however large it may be, and yet the recollection of that huge
structure of leather and wood, with the great iron nose projecting
from the contracting cheeks of it, at the head of the old woman's bed,
so capable yet so useless, did return upon me with terror in the dusk
of that lonely night. It was mingled with a vague suspicion that the
old woman was a bit of a witch, and a very doubtful memory that she
had been seen on one occasion by some night-farer, when a frightful
storm was raging, blowing away at that very bellows as hard as her
skinny arms and lean body could work the lever, so that there was
almost as great a storm of wind in her little room as there was
outside of it. If there was any truth in the story, it is easily
accounted for by the fact that the poor old woman had been a little
out of her mind for many years,--and no wonder, for she was nearly a
hundred, they said. Neither is it any wonder that when Missy stopped
almost suddenly, with her fore-feet and her neck stretched forward,
and her nose pointed straight for the door of the cottage at a few
yards' distance, I should have felt very queer indeed. Whether my hair
stood on end or not I do not know, but I certainly did feel my skin
creep all over me. An ancient elder-tree grew at one end of the
cottage, and I heard the lonely sigh of a little breeze wander through
its branc