y
friend," said Mrs. Calvert.

"I heard thee confess it again and again this same hour," said Mrs.
Logan.

"Ay, and so did I," said her companion. "Murder will out, though the
Almighty should lend hearing to the ears of the willow, and speech to
the seven tongues of the woodriff."

"You are liars and witches!" said he, foaming with rage, "and creatures
fitted from the beginning for eternal destruction. I'll have your bones
and your blood sacrificed on your cursed altars! O Gil-Martin!
Gil-Martin! Where art thou now? Here, here is the proper food for
blessed vengeance! Hilloa!"

There was no friend, no Gil-Martin there to hear or assist him: he was
in the two women's mercy, but they used it with moderation. They
mocked, they tormented, and they threatened him; but, finally, after
putting him in great terror, they bound his hands behind his back, and
his feet fast with long straps of garters which they chanced to have in
their baskets, to prevent him from pursuing them till they were out of
his reach. As they left him, which they did in the middle of the path,
Mrs. Calvert said: "We could easily put an end to thy sinful life, but
our hands shall be free of thy blood. Nevertheless thou art still in
our power, and the vengeance of thy country shall overtake thee, thou
mean and cowardly murderer, ay, and that more suddenly than thou art
aware!"

The women posted to Edinburgh; and as they put themselves under the
protection of an English merchant, who was journeying thither with
twenty horses laden, and armed servants, so they had scarcely any
conversation on the road. When they arrived at Mrs. Logan's house, then
they spoke of what they had seen and heard, and agreed that they had
sufficient proof to condemn young Wringhim, who they thought richly
deserved the severest doom of the law.

"I never in my life saw any human being," said Mrs. Calvert, "whom I
thought so like a fiend. If a demon could inherit flesh and blood, that
youth is precisely such a being as I could conceive that demon to be.
The depth and the malignity of his eye is hideous. His breath is like
the airs from a charnel house, and his flesh seems fading from his
bones, as if the worm that never dies were gnawing it away already."

"He was always repulsive, and every way repulsive," said the other,
"but he is now indeed altered greatly to the worse. While we were
hand-fasting him, I felt his body to be feeble and emaciated; but yet I
know him to be s