nd the perpetual trepidation of the
masoned house, sleep fled my eyelids utterly. I sat by my taper, looking
on the black panes of the window, where the storm appeared continually
on the point of bursting in its entrance; and upon that empty field I
beheld a perspective of consequences that made the hair to rise upon my
scalp. The child corrupted, the home broken up, my master dead, or worse
than dead, my mistress plunged in desolation--all these I saw before me
painted brightly on the darkness; and the outcry of the wind appeared to
mock at my inaction.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] Ordered.

[8] Land steward.

[9] Fooling.

CHAPTER IX

MR. MACKELLAR'S JOURNEY WITH THE MASTER

The chaise came to the door in a strong drenching mist. We took our
leave in silence: the house of Durrisdeer standing with drooping gutters
and windows closed, like a place dedicate to melancholy. I observed the
Master kept his head out, looking back on these splashed walls and
glimmering roofs, till they were suddenly swallowed in the mist; and I
must suppose some natural sadness fell upon the man at this departure;
or was it some prevision of the end? At least, upon our mounting the
long brae from Durrisdeer, as we walked side by side in the wet, he
began first to whistle and then to sing the saddest of our country
tunes, which sets folk weeping in a tavern, "Wandering Willie." The set
of words he used with it I have not heard elsewhere, and could never
come by any copy; but some of them which were the most appropriate to
our departure linger in my memory. One verse began--

"Home was home then, my dear, full of kindly faces;
Home was home then, my dear, happy for the child."

And ended somewhat thus--

"Now, when day dawns on the brow of the moorland,
Lone stands the house, and the chimney-stone is cold,
Lone let it stand, now the folks are all departed,
The kind hearts, the true hearts, that loved the place of old."

I could never be a judge of the merit of these verses; they were so
hallowed by the melancholy of the air, and were sung (or rather
"soothed") to me by a master-singer at a time so fitting. He looked in
my face when he had done, and saw that my eyes watered.

"Ah! Mackellar," said he, "do you think I have never a regret?"

"I do not think you could be so bad a man," said I, "if you had not all
the machinery to be a good one."

"No, not all," says he: "not all. You are there in error. The