began to draw together into one body, and to compare notes.
The agony of the father grew beyond concealment, yet it scarcely equalled
the anguish of the tutor. 'Would to God I had died for him!' the
affectionate creature repeated, in notes of the deepest distress. Those
who were less interested rushed into a tumultuary discussion of chances
and possibilities. Each gave his opinion, and each was alternately swayed
by that of the others. Some thought the objects of their search had gone
aboard the sloop; some that they had gone to a village at three miles'
distance; some whispered they might have been on board the lugger, a few
planks and beams of which the tide now drifted ashore.

At this instant a shout was heard from the beach, so loud, so shrill, so
piercing, so different from every sound which the woods that day had rung
to, that nobody hesitated a moment to believe that it conveyed tidings,
and tidings of dreadful import. All hurried to the place, and, venturing
without scruple upon paths which at another time they would have
shuddered to look at, descended towards a cleft of the rock, where one
boat's crew was already landed. 'Here, sirs, here! this way, for God's
sake! this way! this way!' was the reiterated cry. Ellangowan broke
through the throng which had already assembled at the fatal spot, and
beheld the object of their terror. It was the dead body of Kennedy. At
first sight he seemed to have perished by a fall from the rocks, which
rose above the spot on which he lay in a perpendicular precipice of a
hundred feet above the beach. The corpse was lying half in, half out of
the water; the advancing tide, raising the arm and stirring the clothes,
had given it at some distance the appearance of motion, so that those who
first discovered the body thought that life remained. But every spark had
been long extinguished.

'My bairn! my bairn!' cried the distracted father, 'where can he be?' A
dozen mouths were opened to communicate hopes which no one felt. Some one
at length mentioned--the gipsies! In a moment Ellangowan had reascended
the cliffs, flung himself upon the first horse he met, and rode furiously
to the huts at Derncleugh. All was there dark and desolate; and, as he
dismounted to make more minute search, he stumbled over fragments of
furniture which had been thrown out of the cottages, and the broken wood
and thatch which had been pulled down by his orders. At that moment the
prophecy, or anathema, of Me