James Hogg

“ Walter visited them next day at the time and place appointed, taking with him a dozen of bannocks and a small cheese. These he was obliged to steal out of his own pantry, for he durst not by any means trust his wife and family with the discovery he had made, knowing that he might as well have confided it with the curate himself, the sworn enemy of his motley protegees. They gathered around him with protestations of gratitude and esteem; for the deserted and oppressed generally cling to the first symptoms of friendship and protection with an ardency that too often overshoots its aim. ”

“ Say nae sae, dear bairn; my sight hasna deceived me, yet I have been deceived. The world has deceived me—hell has deceived me—and heaven has winked at the deed. Alak, an’ wae’s me, that it should sae hae been predestined afore the world began! The day was, an’ no sae lang sin’ syne, when I could hae prayed wi’ confidence, an’ sung wi’ joy; but now my mind is overturned, and I hae nouther stay on earth, nor hope in heaven! ”

“ Clavers turned his deep grey eye upon them, which more than the eye of any human being resembled that of a serpent—offence gleamed in it.
“Gentlemen,” said he, “do you consider where you are, and what you are about? Sacre! am I always to be trysted with boys and fools?”
He then began and examined the goodwife with much feigned deference and civility, which so pleased her that she told him every thing with great readiness. She was just beginning to relate the terrible, but unfortunate story of the Brownie of Bodsbeck, and his train of officious spirits ”

“ Katharine quaked, although well accustomed to scenes of no ordinary nature.
“Nanny,” said she, “there is something that preys upon your mind—some great calamity that recurs to your memory, and goes near to unhinge your tranquillity of mind, if not your reason. Will you inform me of it, good Nanny, that I may talk and sympathize with you over it?”
“Dear bairn, nae loss ava—A’ profit! a’ profit i’the main! I haena biggit a bield o’ the windlestrae, nor lippened my weight to a broken reed! Na, na, dear bairn; nae loss ava.” ”

“ Lights were seen moving by night in wilds and caverns where human thing never resided, and where the foot of man seldom had trode.
The shepherds knew, or thought they knew, that no human being frequented these places; and they believed, as well they might, that whole hordes of spirits had taken possession of their remote and solitary dells. They lived in terror and consternation. Those who had no tie in the country left it, and retreated into the vales, where the habitations of men are numerous, and where the fairy, the brownie, or the walking ghost, is rarely seen. ”

“ Kennedy remained several days about Chapelhope in a thoughtful, half delirious frame; but no entreaties could prevail with him at that time to accompany the men of the place to where he supposed the accident had happened, nor yet to give them any account where it was situated, for he averred that he heard a voice say to him in a solemn tone, “If you wish to live long, never tell what you have seen to–night, nor ever come this way again.” ”

“ The shepherd’s dog of the true breed will boldly attack any animal on earth in defence of his master, or at his command; and it is no good sign indeed when he appears terrified, for the shepherd well knows that his dog can discover spirits by the savour of the wind, when he is all unconscious that any such beings are near.
Walter fled into the kitchen with precipitation—he found all the family standing in alarm, for they had heard the hideous uproar in the room. ”

“ To the Old Room he was shown at a late hour, where the lamp, the Bible, and the sand–glass were placed on the little table, at the bed’s head, as usual.
It was past eleven when the curate went to sleep. Old Nanny, who was dressed more neatly than usual, sat still at the kitchen fire, expecting every minute the two covenant–men, whom her young mistress had promised to send to her privily, as her companions and protectors through the dark and silent watches of the night until her return. ”

“ Dundee came to Traquair, and stationed companies of troops in a line across the country. The Laird of Lag placed a body of men in the narrowest pass of Moffatdale, in the only path by which these mountains are accessible. Thus all communication was cut off between the mountain–men and the western counties; for every one who went or came by that way, these soldiers took prisoner, searched, and examined; and one lad, who was coming from Moffat, carrying more bread than they thought he could well account for, they shot dead on the spot just as he had dropt on his knees to pray. ”

“ Thou knowest thy own heart—its hypocrisy, and licentiousness—Thou knowest, that last night, at this same hour, thou didst attempt, by brutal force, to pollute the purest and most angelic of the human race—we rescued her from thy hellish clutch, for we are her servants, and attend upon her steps. ”

“ As soon as her father’s letter was put into her hands, Katharine sent off one of her brothers to Muchrah, to warn old John and his son to come instantly to Chapelhope. They both arrived while she and Nanny were consulting in the Old Room. She told them of her father’s letter, of the jeopardy he was in, and of her intended application to Drummelzier without loss of time. “One of you,” said she, “must accompany me; and I sent for you both, to learn which could, with least inconvenience, be wanted from your flocks.”
“As for me,” said John, “it’s out o’ the question to think about me winning away. ”

“ Next morning Clavers, with fifty dragoons, arrived at Chapelhope, where they alighted on the green; and putting their horses to forage, he and Sir Thomas Livingston, Captain Bruce, and Mr Adam Copland, before mentioned, a gentleman of Clavers’ own troop, went straight into the kitchen. Walter was absent at the hill. The goodwife was sitting lonely in the east room, brooding over her trials and woes in this life, and devising means to get rid of her daughter, and with her of all the devouring spirits that haunted Chapelhope ”

“ Jasper, son to old John of the Muchrah, was the swiftest runner of his time; but of all those whose minds were kept in continual agitation on account of the late inundation of spirits into the country, Jasper was the chief. He was beset by them morning and evening; and even at high noon, if the day was dark, he never considered himself as quite safe. He depended entirely upon his speed in running to avoid their hellish intercourse ”

“ We have been counted as sheep for the slaughter; we have been killed all the day long; yet hath the Lord forgotten to be gracious, and is his mercy clean gone for ever!”
“Peace, peace, for Heaven’s sake!—You are verging on blasphemy, and know not what you say.”
[266] “Do the reprobate know what they say, or can they forbear? How then can I? I, who am in the bond of iniquity, and the jaws of death eternal?—Where can I fly? When the righteous are not saved, where shall the ungodly and the sinner appear?—Ay, dear bairn, weel may ye stare and raise up your hands that gate ”

“ He spoke of going away to Henderland in the evening, but she entreated him so earnestly to stay and protect her from the power of the spirits that haunted the place, that he deemed it proper to acquiesce, for without the countenance of the family of Chapelhope he was nothing—he could not have lived in his puny cure. She depended on him, she said, to rid the town of these audacious (or, as she called them, misleared) beings altogether, for without his interference the family would be ruined. ”

“ Dinna fear, gudeman! dinna fear! There’s nae blood shed in sic a cause that can ever be shed in vain. Na, na! that blood will argue better at the bar o’ Heaven for poor distressed Scotland than all the prayers of all the living. We hae done muckle, but we’ll do mair yet—muckle blood has been wantonly and diabolically shed, and our’s may rin wi’ the rest—we’ll no thraw’t wantonly and exultingly away; but, when our day comes, we’ll gie it cheerfully—as cheerfully, gudeman, as ever ye paid your mail to a kind landlord, even though the season had been hard and stormy. ”

“ Stupid as Maysey was, she knew the way to her husband’s heart. Davie could not resist such an appeal—he took the Bible; sung the 143d psalm, from beginning to end, at Nanny’s request; and likewise, by her direction, read the 20th of Revelations; then kneeling down on his bare knees, legs, [284] and feet, as he fled from the kitchen, on the damp miry floor of the milk–house, he essayed a strong energetic prayer as a fence against the invading ghost. ”

“ How she spent the remainder of it, or by what means she got to her bed in the kitchen, she never knew; but next morning when the goodwife and her sons arose, poor old Nanny was lying in the kitchen bed delirious, and talking of dreadful and incomprehensible things. All that could be gathered from her frenzy was, that some terrible catastrophe had happened in the Old Room, and that Clerk, the curate, was implicated in it. ”

“ The time on which the incidents here recorded took place, was, I believe, in the autumn of the year 1685, the most dismal and troublous time that these districts of the south and west of Scotland ever saw, or have since seen. The persecution for religion then raged in its wildest and most unbridled fury: the Covenanters, or the whigs, as they were then called, were proscribed, imprisoned, and at last hunted down like wild beasts. ”

“ York hath said in full assembly, ‘that neither the realm nor the mother–church can ever be safe, until the south of Scotland is again made a hunting forest;’ and his commissioner hath sworn by the [75] living God, ‘that never a whig shall again have time or warning to prepare for Heaven, for that hell is too good for them.’ Can we hope for these men relaxing? No! The detestable and bloody Clavers, that wizard! that eater of toads! that locust of the infernal pit, hems us in closer and closer on one side, and that Muscovite beast on the other! They thirst for our blood ”

“ All the outer parts of the lands of Chapelhope are broken into thousands of deep [20] black ruts, called by the country people moss haggs. Each of the largest of these has a green stripe along its bottom; and in this place in particular they are so numerous, so intersected and complex in their lines, that, as a hiding–place, they are unequalled—men, foxes, and sheep, may all there find cover with equal safety from being discovered, and may hide for days and nights without being aware of one another. ”

“ And in like manner we do hereby disclaim all unwarrantable practices committed by any few persons reputed to be of us, whereby the Lord hath been offended, his cause wronged, and we all made to endure the scourge of tongues; for which things we have desired to make conscience of mourning before the Lord, both in public and private. As the unwarrantable manner of killing that curate at the Corsephairn, though he was a man of death both by the laws of God and man, and the fact not materially murder ”

“ That undefined and mingled hum—
Voice of the desart, never dumb!—
All these have left within this heart
A feeling tongue can ne’er impart; ”

“ He slipped away from Chapelhope in a few days, and was no more seen until the time that Copland and his men appeared there. It was he who came as guide to that soldiers that were slain, and he fell with them [64] in the strait linn of the South Grain of Chapelhope.
These mysterious and unaccountable incidents by degrees impressed the minds of the inhabitants with terror that cannot be described; no woman or boy would go out of doors after sunset, on any account whatever, and there was scarcely a man who durst venture forth alone after the fall of evening. ”

“ Never was man in such a predicament as Walter now found himself with regard to his family. Katharine had never been a favourite with her mother, who doated on her boys to the detriment of the girl, but to him she was all in all. Her demeanour of late completely puzzled him—The words that she had said to him the preceding evening had no appearance of jocularity ”

“ In short, Walter was an honest, conscientious, good, old–fashioned man, but he made no great fuss about religion, and many supposed that he did not care a pin who was right or who was wrong.
On the 23d of August, Clavers (I think it best to denominate him so, as he is always called by that name in the country,) dispatched nineteen men from Traquair, under [30] the command of one Copland, a gentleman volunteer in his troop, and a very brave young man, to gain intelligence concerning the murder of the curate, and use every means to bring the perpetrators to justice. ”

“ The family and servants were in general swayed by their mistress, who took a decided part with Clerk in all his schemes against the whigs, and constantly dispatched one of her own servants to carry his messages of information to the king’s officers. This circumstance soon became known to the mountain–men, and though they were always obliged to take refuge on the lands of Chapelhope by day, they avoided carefully all communication with the family or shepherds (for several of the shepherds on that farm lived in cottages at a great distance from one another and from the farm–house.) ”

“ An’ do thou, moreover, fauld us ower–night, an’ every night, in within the true sheep–fauld o’ thy covenant, weel buggen wi’ the stanes o’ salvation, an’ caped wi’ the divots o’ grace. An’ then wi’ sic a shepherd, an’ sic a sheep–fauld, what hae wi’ to be feared for? Na, na! we’ll fear naething but sin!—We’ll never mair scare at the poolly–woolly o’ the whaup, nor swirl at the gelloch o’ the ern; for if the arm of our Shepherd be about us for good, a’ the imps, an’ a’ the powers o’ darkness, canna wrang a hair o’ our tails. ”