dashing of the rain.

"In that day ye may go thirty mile and not hear a crawing cock," he
said; "and fifty mile and not get a light to your pipe; and an hundred
mile and not see a smoking house. For there'll be naething in all
Scotland but deid men's banes and blackness, and the living anger of the
Lord. O, where to find a bield--O sirs, where to find a bield from the
wind of the Lord's anger? Do ye call _this_ a wind? Bethankit! Sirs,
this is but a temporary dispensation; this is but a puff of wind, this
is but a spit of rain and by with it. Already there's a blue bow in the
west, and the sun will take the crown of the causeway again, and your
things'll be dried upon ye, and your flesh will be warm upon your bones.
But O, sirs, sirs! for the day of the Lord's anger!"

His rhetoric was set forth with an ear-piercing elocution, and a voice
that sometimes crashed like cannon. Such as it was, it was the gift of
all hill-preachers, to a singular degree of likeness or identity. Their
images scarce ranged beyond the red horizon of the moor and the rainy
hill-top, the shepherd and his sheep, a fowling-piece, a spade, a pipe,
a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun.
An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big
Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart;
bleak, austere, but genuine, and redolent of the soil.

A little before the coming of the squall there was a different scene
enacting at the outposts. For the most part, the sentinels were faithful
to their important duty; the Hill-end of Drumlowe was known to be a safe
meeting-place; and the out-pickets on this particular day had been
somewhat lax from the beginning, and grew laxer during the inordinate
length of the discourse. Francie lay there in his appointed hiding-hole,
looking abroad between two whin-bushes. His view was across the course
of the burn, then over a piece of plain moorland, to a gap between two
hills; nothing moved but grouse, and some cattle who slowly traversed
his field of view, heading northward: he heard the psalms, and sang
words of his own to the savage and melancholy music; for he had his own
design in hand, and terror and cowardice prevailed in his bosom
alternately, like the hot and the cold fit of an ague. Courage was
uppermost during the singing, which he accompanied through all its
length with this impromptu strain:

"And I will ding Jock Crozer down
No later