father or his grandfather, and bear witness if he is
not their living image?' A murmur went through the crowd; the resemblance
was too striking to be denied. 'And now hear me; and let that man,'
pointing to Hatteraick, who was seated with his keepers on a sea-chest at
some distance--'let him deny what I say if he can. That is Henry Bertram,
son to Godfrey Bertram, umquhile of Ellangowan; that young man is the
very lad-bairn that Dirk Hatteraick carried off from Warroch wood the day
that he murdered the gauger. I was there like a wandering spirit, for I
longed to see that wood or we left the country. I saved the bairn's life,
and sair, sair I prigged and prayed they would leave him wi' me. But they
bore him away, and he's been lang ower the sea, and now he's come for his
ain, and what should withstand him? I swore to keep the secret till he
was ane-an'-twenty; I kenn'd he behoved to dree his weird till that day
cam. I keepit that oath which I took to them; but I made another vow to
mysell, that if I lived to see the day of his return I would set him in
his father's seat, if every step was on a dead man. I have keepit that
oath too. I will be ae step mysell, he (pointing to Hatteraick) will soon
be another, and there will be ane mair yet.'

The clergyman, now interposing, remarked it was a pity this deposition
was not regularly taken and written down, and the surgeon urged the
necessity of examining the wound, previously to exhausting her by
questions. When she saw them removing Hatteraick, in order to clear the
room and leave the surgeon to his operations, she called out aloud,
raising herself at the same time upon the couch, 'Dirk Hatteraick, you
and I will never meet again until we are before the judgment-seat; will
ye own to what I have said, or will you dare deny it?' He turned his
hardened brow upon her, with a look of dumb and inflexible defiance.
'Dirk Hatteraick, dare ye deny, with my blood upon your hands, one word
of what my dying breath is uttering?' He looked at her with the same
expression of hardihood and dogged stubbornness, and moved his lips, but
uttered no sound. 'Then fareweel!' she said, 'and God forgive you! your
hand has sealed my evidence. When I was in life I was the mad randy
gipsy, that had been scourged and banished and branded; that had begged
from door to door, and been hounded like a stray tyke from parish to
parish; wha would hae minded HER tale? But now I am a dying woman, and my
words wil