found?"

"No, sir--though they searched high and low; they are not found, indeed,
till this day. It was thought the Black Officer had sold himself and
twelve other men, sir."

"To the Devil?"

"It would be that."

For the narrator never mentions our ghostly foe, which produces a solemn
effect.

This story was absolutely new to me, and much I wished that Mr. Louis
Stevenson could have heard it. The blending of the far East with the
Highlands reminds one of his "Master of Ballantrae," and what might he
not make of that fairy red deer! My boatman, too, told me what Mr.
Stevenson says the Highlanders will not tell--the name of the man who
committed the murder of which Alan Breck was accused. But this secret I
do not intend to divulge.

The story of the Black Officer then seemed absolutely unpublished. But
when Sir Walter Scott's diary was given to the world in October, 1890, it
turned out that he was not wholly ignorant of the legend. In 1828 he
complains that he has been annoyed by a lady, because he had printed "in
the 'Review'" a rawhead and bloody-bones story of her father, Major
Macpherson, who was lost in a snowstorm. This Major Macpherson was
clearly the Black Officer. Mr. Douglas, the publisher of Scott's diary,
discovered that the "Review" mentioned vaguely by Scott was the "Foreign
Quarterly," No. I, July, 1827. In an essay on Hoffmann's novels, Sir
Walter introduced the tale as told to him in a letter from a nobleman
some time deceased, not more distinguished for his love of science than
his attachment to literature in all its branches.

The tale is too long to be given completely. Briefly, a Captain M., on
St. Valentine's day, 1799, had been deer-shooting (at an odd time of the
year) in the hills west of D-. He did not return, a terrible snowstorm
set in, and finally he and his friends were found dead in a bothy, which
the tempest had literally destroyed. Large stones from the walls were
found lying at distances of a hundred yards; the wooden uprights were
twisted like broken sticks. The Captain was lying dead, without his
clothes, on the bed; one man was discovered at a distance, another near
the Captain. Then it was remembered that, at the same bothy a month
before, a shepherd lad had inquired for the Captain, had walked with him
for some time, and that, on the officer's return, "a mysterious anxiety
hung about him." A fire had also been seen blazing on an opposite
height, and when som