hink that Kippletringan was actually
retreating before him in proportion to his advance.

It was now very cloudy, although the stars from time to time shed a
twinkling and uncertain light. Hitherto nothing had broken the silence
around him but the deep cry of the bog-blitter, or bull-of-the-bog, a
large species of bittern, and the sighs of the wind as it passed along
the dreary morass. To these was now joined the distant roar of the ocean,
towards which the traveller seemed to be fast approaching. This was no
circumstance to make his mind easy. Many of the roads in that country lay
along the sea-beach, and were liable to be flooded by the tides, which
rise with great height, and advance with extreme rapidity. Others were
intersected with creeks and small inlets, which it was only safe to pass
at particular times of the tide. Neither circumstance would have suited a
dark night, a fatigued horse, and a traveller ignorant of his road.
Mannering resolved, therefore, definitively to halt for the night at the
first inhabited place, however poor, he might chance to reach, unless he
could procure a guide to this unlucky village of Kippletringan.

A miserable hut gave him an opportunity to execute his purpose. He found
out the door with no small difficulty, and for some time knocked without
producing any other answer than a duet between a female and a cur-dog,
the latter yelping as if he would have barked his heart out, the other
screaming in chorus. By degrees the human tones predominated; but the
angry bark of the cur being at the instant changed into a howl, it is
probable something more than fair strength of lungs had contributed to
the ascendency.

'Sorrow be in your thrapple then!' these were the first articulate words,
'will ye no let me hear what the man wants, wi' your yaffing?'

'Am I far from Kippletringan, good dame?'

'Frae Kippletringan!!!' in an exalted tone of wonder, which we can but
faintly express by three points of admiration. 'Ow, man! ye should hae
hadden eassel to Kippletringan; ye maun gae back as far as the whaap, and
baud the whaap till ye come to Ballenloan, and then--'

'This will never do, good dame! my horse is almost quite knocked up; can
you not give me a night's lodgings?'

'Troth can I no; I am a lone woman, for James he's awa to Drumshourloch
Fair with the year-aulds, and I daurna for my life open the door to ony
o' your gang-there-out sort o' bodies.'

'But what must I do then, good da