hich,
along with the unhappy maiden in a half-lifeless state, was carried into
a cottage, and laid in that apartment distinguished among the peasantry
by the name of the chamber. While the peasant's wife was left to take
care of Phemie, old man and matron and maid had collected around the
drowned youth, and each began to relate the circumstances of his death,
when the door suddenly opened, and his sister, advancing to the corpse,
with a look of delirious serenity, broke out into a wild laugh and said:
'Oh, it is wonderful, it's truly wonderful! That bare and death-cold
body, dragged from the darkest pool of Corrie, with its hands filled with
fine wool, wears the perfect similitude of my own Elphin! I'll tell
ye--the spiritual dwellers of the earth, the fairyfolk of our evening
tale, have stolen the living body, and fashioned this cold and inanimate
clod to mislead your pursuit. In common eyes this seems all that Elphin
Irving would be, had he sunk in Corriewater; but so it seems not to me.
Ye have sought the living soul, and ye have found only its garment. But
oh, if ye had beheld him, as I beheld him to-night, riding among the
elfin troop, the fairest of them all; had you clasped him in your arms,
and wrestled for him with spirits and terrible shapes from the other
world, till your heart quailed and your flesh was subdued, then would ye
yield no credit to the semblance which this cold and apparent flesh bears
to my brother. But hearken! On Hallowmass Eve, when the spiritual
people are let loose on earth for a season, I will take my stand in the
burial-ground of Corrie; and when my Elphin and his unchristened troop
come past, with the sound of all their minstrelsy, I will leap on him and
win him, or perish for ever.'

"All gazed aghast on the delirious maiden, and many of her auditors gave
more credence to her distempered speech than to the visible evidence
before them. As she turned to depart, she looked round, and suddenly
sank upon the body, with tears streaming from her eyes, and sobbed out,
'My brother! Oh, my brother!' She was carried out insensible, and again
recovered; but relapsed into her ordinary delirium, in which she
continued till the Hallow Eve after her brother's burial. She was found
seated in the ancient burial-ground, her back against a broken
gravestone, her locks white with frost-rime, watching with intensity of
look the road to the kirkyard; but the spirit which gave life to the
fairest