her straight
course--and, for a moment, seems to have made good her escape. Shooting
headlong one over the other, all three, with erected tails, suddenly
bring themselves up--like racing barks when down goes the helm, and one
after another, bowsprit and boom almost entangled, rounds the buoy, and
again bears up on the starboard tack upon a wind--and in a close line,
head to heel, so that you might cover them all with a sheet--again, all
opened-mouthed on her haunches, seem to drive, and go with her over the
cliff.

We are all on foot--and pray what horse could gallop through among all
these quagmires, over all the hags in these peat-mosses, over all the
water-cressy and puddocky ditches, sinking soft on hither and thither
side, even to the two-legged leaper's ankle or knee--up that hill on
the perpendicular strewn with flint-shivers--down these loose-hanging
cliffs--through that brake of old stunted birches with stools hard as
iron--over that mile of quaking muir where the plover breeds--and--
finally--up--up--up to where the dwarfed heather dies away among the
cinders, and in winter you might mistake a flock of ptarmigan for a
patch of snow?

The thing is impossible--so we are all on foot--and the fleetest keeper
that ever footed it in Scotland shall not in a run of three miles give
us sixty yards. "Ha! Peter the wild boy, how are you off for wind?"--we
exultingly exclaim, in giving Red-jacket the go-by on the bent. But
see--see--they are bringing her back again down the Red Mount--glancing
aside, she throws them all three out--yes, all three, and few enow too,
though fair play be a jewel--and ere they can recover, she is ahead a
hundred yards up the hill. There is a beautiful trial of bone and
bottom! Now one, and then another, takes almost imperceptibly the lead;
but she steals away from them inch by inch--beating them all blind--and,
suddenly disappearing--Heaven knows how--leaves them all in the lurch.
With out-lolling tongues, hanging heads, panting sides, and drooping
tails, they come one by one down the steep, looking somewhat sheepish,
and then lie down together on their sides, as if indeed about to die in
defeat. She has carried away her cocked fud unscathed for the third
time, from Three of the Best in all broad Scotland--nor can there any
longer be the smallest doubt in the world, in the minds of the most
sceptical, that she is--what all the country-side have long known her to
be--a Witch.

From cat-kil