fects from his first incautious draught of
small-beer, he ate and drank heartily. From the way in which the patch
of sunlight crept up the wall, it was easy to tell that the time was
evening. Could it indeed be that no more than twenty-four hours back he
had ridden, secure and free from this horrible care, along the shining
sands by the crisp salt wavelets of the Forth?

What was that voice that he now heard, thin and hollow, on the evening
air? "Far yaud! far yaud!" and then, with eldritch scream, "_Bauty_," it
cried. Such sounds, coming from he knew not where, fell disturbingly on
the unaccustomed ears of a seventeenth-century Judge of Session, and
Lord Durie's sleep that night was broken by grim dreams.

Day followed day, week pressed on the heels of week, and still never a
human face smiled on the unhappy judge. Each morning he found on his
little table a supply of food and drink, all good of their kind and
plenty--boiled beef or mutton, oaten cakes, pease bannocks, and always
the jack of small-beer--but never did he see human hand place them
there, never did human form cheer him by its presence.

The solitary confinement and the utter want of occupation told on a
nervous, somewhat highly strung temperament; and in the judge's mind
superstition began to hold unquestioned sway. Things taught him in
childhood by an old nurse, things which now folks, indeed, still
believed, but which he himself had to some extent given up or dismissed
from his thoughts, began to crowd back again into his brain. No mere
human power, surely, could have brought him here as he had been brought.
Was it in the dungeon of some sorcerer, of some disciple of the Devil,
that he now lay? Then, the shuffling old step that he heard so
frequently, the thin voice calling, "Hey! Maudge," followed always by
the mewing of a cat--what could that be but some old hag, given over to
evil deeds, talking to her familiar? It was but the other day that, with
his own eyes, he had seen nine witches burned together on Leith Sands,
and all, ere they died, had confessed to the most horrid commerce with
the Devil. It was no great time since a witch, under torture, had
revealed in her confession the terrible truth, of how two hundred women
had been wont to flock at night to a certain kirk in North Berwick,
there to listen eagerly to Satan preaching blasphemy and denouncing the
King. Even a judge was not safe from their malice. And could he but
escape from the snare