the stack yard; they did not know what their ain bairns might come to, nor to whom, if going to the wars, they might be indebted."

On a certain day, as the pedler came through the most dreary part of WoodMore, where was a narrow pathway that skirted the lip of Lady Maisry's burn; and where even noonday looked like the gloamin of a winter's evening, there met him a spectre in the very dress of the Laird St. Clyde, having a rope round his neck, and a sand-glass in his hand. The pedler flew away from the wood, and never stopped till he got to Mactaggart's the change-keeper's house, which was his general rendezvous. The fright into which he was thrown brought on a fever; and every body hoped that the pedler, if he was guilty, as he was now given up by the doctor, would confess something: confession made he none,

even though the minister attended him.

When Lerwick, the pedler, had recovered, he was going one very gloomy night, in the dead watch and midnight too, along with two other men between the lochs, in the upper one of which St. Clyde's corpse had been found; and just as they approached a jungle of furze that skirted a clump of bushes, lying between the travellers and Ambrisbeg loch, on a sudden, there was visibly seen to emerge from between the jungle of furze and the thicket of hazle bushes, a figure, whom both the men that were with the pedler, would have sworn was old St. Clyde, had he not been both dead and buried.

The spectre approached them with a firm step and upright gait; holding in his right hand an hour glass, and having a rope round its neck. The pedler and the men stopt short; the ghost

also halted; their hair stood on end, like quills on the back of a porcupine ; and as the spectre yet approached in slow and stately gait, they saw it plainly with oppressed and fear-surprised eyes, and their frames were "distilled almost to jelly by the act of fear;" all three stood dumb and spoke not to it; and now the spectre stopt again, and "did address itself to motion," and spoke thus:

The days o' the man that killed the laird,
Are by Heaven a while yet spared;

But sure as the sand o' this glass runs out, He'll be hang'd on a tree, be his heart e'er sae stout. In an instant the spectre stalked close by their sides on the road, and went down the side of the loch, and then up the pathway that led to Michael Scott's stair; for one of the two men who was with Lerwick had presence of mind enough to follow it with his eyes' keenest gaze, though he could give no tongue to questions many

crowding on his mind, before it shrank with hasty step away, and vanished from his sight. But when it was gone, they wondered much that none of them spoke; and now there was no doubt but the ghost of St. Clyde would never rest till the murderer was found out.

And though the pedler kept its first. appearance to himself a secret, he joined now the other two in relating the hideous apparition they had seen between the lochs, and how "they swat at every pore, sweat as cauld as a December's rain."

Yet, though all the people in the neighbourhood of the loch had been out late, and though several had passed that way at midnight, and though parties of stout-hearted young men went and traversed that road and all about the loch at midnight, this spectre could never again be seen;-but the words it spake were well remembered by the

man who had courage enough to follow its steps till he lost it at Michael's stair, and every little child could repeat these words as readily as its own name.

What puzzled even the knowing ones was the account of the hour-glass. Every one knew the dominie's hourglass had been missing, and no one would believe that ghosts were ever known to steal. Even the dominie, who had undertaken to detect the sophism by which Zeno pretended to prove, that the swift-footed Achilles could. never overtake a tortoise, if they set out together, and the tortoise were at first at any distance before Achilles, could neither detect the thief nor the murderer; nor believe that it was mortal hand that held before the eyes of three credible men, an hour glass, the sand of which was diminishing in the ratio of its neck to the weight of the sand that had to pass through that neck.