ted
some of the seaport villages of Banffshire for the northern side of the
Moray Frith, about the year 1718; and, when pushing on in the darkness,
straining as I best could, to maintain a sorely-tried umbrella against
the capricious struggles of the tempest, that now tatooed furiously upon
its back as if it were a kettle-drum, and now got underneath its stout
ribs, and threatened to send it up aloft like a balloon, and anon
twisted it from side to side, and strove to turn it inside out, like a
Kilmarnock night-cap,--I employed myself in arranging in my mind the
details of the narrative, as they had been communicated to me half an
age before by a female relative.

The opening of the story, though it existed long ere the times of Sir
Walter Scott or the Waverly novels, bears some resemblance to the
opening in the "Monastery," of the story of the White Lady of Avenel.
The wife of a Banffshire proprietor of the minor class had been about
six months dead, when one of her husband's ploughmen, returning on
horseback from the smithy, in the twilight of an autumn evening, was
accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and
slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood
of her mantle, who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse, and
carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that
seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself, in the
form of a chill fluid, between his skull and the scalp. The request,
too, appeared a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and
could present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid
traveller. But the man, unwilling ungallantly to offend a lady, turned
his horse to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was,
however, a personage that could be better seen than felt; she came in
contact with the ploughman's back, he said, as if she had been an
ill-filled sack of wool; and when, on reaching the opposite side of the
streamlet, she leaped down as slightly as she had mounted, and he turned
fearfully round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the
conviction that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her
texture than himself. She had opened, with two pale, thin arms, the
enveloping hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed
marked, however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had
just succeeded in playing off a good joke. "My dead mist