lythe goodman had seen sights that made
him grave enough at times, though he aye tried to laugh them away.

"Aweel, atween that very rock aneath us and the coming tide, I saw, or
thought I saw--for the tale is so dreamlike that the whole might pass for
a vision of the night,--I saw the form of a man; his plaid was grey, his
face was grey; and his hair, which hung low down till it nearly came to
the middle of his back, was as white as the white sea-foam. He began to
howk and dig under the bank; an' God be near me, thought I, this maun be
the unblessed spirit of auld Adam Gowdgowpin the miser, who is doomed to
dig for shipwrecked treasure, and count how many millions are hidden for
ever from man's enjoyment. The form found something which in shape and
hue seemed a left-foot slipper of brass; so down to the tide he marched,
and, placing it on the water, whirled it thrice round, and the infernal
slipper dilated at every turn, till it became a bonnie barge with its
sails bent, and on board leaped the form, and scudded swiftly away. He
came to one of the Haunted Ships, and striking it with his oar, a fair
ship, with mast and canvas and mariners, started up; he touched the other
Haunted Ship, and produced the like transformation; and away the three
spectre ships bounded, leaving a track of fire behind them on the billows
which was long unextinguished. Now wasna that a bonnie and fearful sight
to see beneath the light of the Hallowmas moon? But the tale is far frae
finished, for mariners say that once a year, on a certain night, if ye
stand on the Borran Point, ye will see the infernal shallops coming
snoring through the Solway; ye will hear the same laugh and song and
mirth and minstrelsy which our ancestors heard; see them bound over the
sandbanks and sunken rocks like sea-gulls, cast their anchor in Blawhooly
Bay, while the shadowy figure lowers down the boat, and augments their
numbers with the four unhappy mortals to whose memory a stone stands in
the kirkyard, with a sinking ship and a shoreless sea cut upon it. Then
the spectre ships vanish, and the drowning shriek of mortals and the
rejoicing laugh of fiends are heard, and the old hulls are left as a
memorial that the old spiritual kingdom has not departed from the earth.
But I maun away, and trim my little cottage fire, and make it burn and
blaze up bonnie, to warm the crickets and my cold and crazy bones that
maun soon be laid aneath the green sod in the eerie kir