and
Cousin George came strongly out against the lairds. The chill winter
night had fallen on the dark hills and alder-skirted river of
Strathcarron, as, turning from off the road that winds along the Kyle of
Dornoch, we entered its bleak gorge; and as the shepherd's dwelling lay
high up the valley, where the lofty sides approach so near, and rise so
abruptly, that for the whole winter quarter the sun never falls on the
stream below, we had still some ten or twelve miles of broken road
before us. The moon, in her first quarter, hung on the edge of the
hills, dimly revealing their rough outline; while in a recess of the
stream, far beneath, we could see the torch of some adventurous fisher,
now gleaming red on rock and water, now suddenly disappearing, eclipsed
by the overhanging brushwood. It was late ere we reached the shepherd's
cottage--a dark-raftered, dimly-lighted erection of turf and stone. The
weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the
flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common scourge of the
sheep-farmer at such seasons on damp, boggy farms. The beams were laden
with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the
conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank-table below,
there rose two tall pyramids of braxy-mutton, heaped up each on a
corn-riddle. The shepherd--a Highlander of large proportions, but hard,
and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters--sat
moodily beside the fire. The state of his flocks was not cheering; and,
besides, he had seen a vision of late, he said, that filled his mind
with strange forebodings. He had gone out after nightfall on the
previous evening to a dank hollow, in which many of his flock had died.
The rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in,
and filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapour, dimly
lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as if resting on
the hill-top. The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him--for
he had climbed half-way up the acclivity--when suddenly the figure of a
man, formed as of heated metal--the figure of what seemed to be a brazen
man brought to a red heat in a furnace--sprang up out of the darkness;
and, after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few brief seconds,
during which, however, it had traversed the greater part of the valley,
it as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind
it. T