ought it would be a hare, and I stopped to
let her get away, for I would not be crossing her path, but see her I
could not, and I turned round to speak to 'Glen,' and there was no dog
there at all.

"Ay, well, I whistled and I whistled in that dreary place till the
noise of it put a fear on me, and I started on again, and there at my
side was the swish, swish in the sprits, and I would be poking my crook
among them, but when I would be stopping it would be stopping, and I
felt my hair bristle on my neck for the fear on me; but I pushed on,
looking at my feet and all round me, till something inside of myself
made me be looking up, and there was something before me, wi' eyes
glowering at me--oh, big, big it was, as a stack o' hay, and it was in
my path, and I shut my eyes and stood, for it would kill me. And when
nothing would be happening I opened my two eyes, and it was not there,
and then I looked round with just my head, and aw!"--and a shudder went
through the shepherd, and he gulped at his drink,--"it was just at my
own very shoulder grinning at me. And I ran and ran, skirling like a
hare, and it behind me--ran till I felt my heart beating in my throat,
and ran through burn and briars and hedges till I ran into the barn and
fell on the straw, and remembered no more."

"And why," says I, "did you not run into your ain house?"

"Are you not knowing that?" says Donald. "If I had run to my house and
the door shut, I would just be fallin' dead on the doorstep."

"There's McGilp," says Dan. "He aye carries a sail needle in his kep
lining, and he'll say it's just to be handy, but it's aye been in the
same place. An' what will it be for, Neil Crubach?"

Neil looked up, his blue eyes hazy with dreaming things out of the
past. His face was very beautiful, and his body massive and strong,
but he halted on his leg, and could walk but lamely.

"Oh," says Neil, with a kindly smile, "you will be knowing that surely,
and you a McBride, and reared among the rocks and the bonnie heather.

"It will just be that when our forefathers would be among the hill sat
night, many and many's the time the evil one would be coming to them
and speaking, and sometimes he would be coming in the form of a black
dog, like the Black Hound o' Nourn, wi' a red tongue lolling from his
mouth, and sometimes he would be a wild cat louping among the rocks,
hissing and spitting wi' his eyes lowin', and the old wise ones in the
far glen found the p