at, if every step was on a dead man. I have
keepit that oath, too;--I will be ae step mysell--he" (pointing to
Hatteraick), "will soon be another, and there will me ane mair yet."

The clergyman now interposing, remarked it was a pity this deposition
was not regularly taken and written down, and the surgeon urged the
necessity of examining the wound, previously to exhausting her by
questions. When she saw them removing Hatteraick, in order to clear
the room and leave the surgeon to his operations, she called out
aloud, raising herself at the same time upon the couch, "Dirk
Hatteraick, you and I will never meet again until we are before the
judgment seat--will you own to what I have said, or will you dare deny
it?" He turned his hardened brow upon her, with a look of dumb and
inflexible defiance. "Dirk Hatteraick, dare ye deny, with my blood
upon your hands, one word of what my dying breath is uttering?" He
looked at her with the same expression of hardihood and dogged
stubbornness, and moved his lips, but uttered no sound. "Then
fareweel!" she said, "and God forgive you! your hand has sealed my
evidence. When I was in life, I was the mad randy gipsy, that had been
scourged, and banished, and branded--that had begged from door to
door, and been hounded like a stray from parish to parish--wha would
hae minded her tale? But now I am a dying woman, and my words will not
fall to the ground, any more than the earth will cover my blood!"

She here paused, and all left the hut except the surgeon and two or
three women. After a short examination, he shook his head, and
resigned his post by the dying woman's side to the clergyman.

A chaise returning empty to Kippletringan had been stopt on the
high-road by a constable, who foresaw it would be necessary to convey
Hatteraick to jail. The driver, understanding what was going on at
Derncleugh, left his horses to the care of the blackguard boy,
confiding, it is to be supposed, rather in the years and discretion of
the cattle, than in those of their keeper, and set off full speed, to
see, as he exprest himself, "whaten a sort o' fun was gaun on." He
arrived just as the group of tenants and peasants, whose numbers
increased every moment, satiated with gazing upon the rugged features
of Hatteraick, had turned their attention toward Bertram. Almost all
of them, especially the aged men who had seen Ellengowan in his better
days, felt and acknowledged the justice of Meg Merriles's appeal