e one man who was trudging his homeward way from
Crailing to Eckford.

Dandy Jim, the packman, was a young fellow who wanted more than evil
weather and a dreich, black night to depress him. A fine, upstanding lad
he was, with a glib English tongue that readily sold his wares, and
which, along with a handsome, merry face, helped him with ease into the
good graces of those whom he familiarly knew as "the lasses." Dandy Jim
had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were
nearly past. He was seriously thinking of matrimony.

"She's a bonny lass," thought he contemplatively, dwelling on the charms
of the young cook at the farmhouse he had left just past midnight,
"bonny and thrifty, and as fond o' a laugh as I am mysel. That bit shop
as ye come out o' Hexham, with red roses growing up the front o't, and
fine-scented laylock bushes at the back, that would do us fine...."

And so, safely wrapped up in happy plans and in thoughts of his
apple-cheeked lady-love, Jim manfully splashed through puddles and
tramped through mud, conscience free, and fearful of nothing in earth or
out of it. The graveyard at Eckford possessed no horrors for him.
"Bogles," quoth he, "what's a bogle? I threw muckle Sandy, the wrestler,
at Lammas Fair, an' pity the bogle that meddles wi' me."

But, nevertheless, Jim, glancing towards the old church with its
surrounding tombstones as he went by, saw something he did not expect,
and quickly checked the defiant whistle that is, somehow, an infallible
aid to the courage of even the bravest. There was a light over there
among the graves, a flickering light that the wind lightly tossed, and
that, somehow, did not suggest likeable things, even to Dandy Jim.
Stock-still he stood for a couple of minutes watching the yellow glimmer
among the tombstones, and then, with grim suspicion in his mind, he
walked up to the churchyard gate. Nowadays we have only an occasional
"watch-tower" in an old kirkyard, or a rusted iron cage over a
grass-grown grave to remind us of times when human hyaenas prowled abroad
after nightfall, and carried off their white, cold prey to be chaffered
for by surgeons for the dissecting-rooms. But Dandy Jim's day was the
day of Burke and Hare, of Dr. Knox, and of many another murderous and
scientific ghoul, and a lantern's gleam in a churchyard in the small
hours usually meant but one thing. As he expected, a gig stood at the
churchyard gate; a bony, strong-shouldered, c