r too tedious in
presence of the mantling milk-cans, bullion-bars of butter, and
crackling cakes; and the great Being who gave them that day their daily
bread, looked down from his Eternal Throne, well pleased with the piety
of his thankful creatures.

The great Golden Eagle, the pride and the pest of the parish, stooped
down, and away with something in his talons. One single sudden female
shriek--and then shouts and outcries as if a church spire had tumbled
down on a congregation at a sacrament. "Hannah Lamond's bairn! Hannah
Lamond's bairn!" was the loud fast-spreading cry. "The Eagle's taen aff
Hannah Lamond's bairn!" and many hundred feet were in another instant
hurrying towards the mountain. Two miles of hill and dale, and copse and
shingle, and many intersecting brooks, lay between; but in an incredibly
short time the foot of the mountain was alive with people. The eyrie was
well known, and both old birds were visible on the rock-ledge. But who
shall scale that dizzy cliff, which Mark Steuart the sailor, who had
been at the storming of many a fort, once attempted in vain? All kept
gazing, or weeping, or wringing of hands, rooted to the ground, or
running back and forwards, like so many ants, essaying their new wings,
in discomfiture. "What's the use--what's the use o' ony puir human
means? We have nae power but in prayer!" And many knelt down--fathers
and mothers thinking of their own babies--as if they would force the
deaf heavens to hear.

Hannah Lamond had been all this while sitting on a stone, with a face
perfectly white, and eyes like those of a mad person, fixed on the
eyrie. Nobody noticed her; for strong as all sympathies with her had
been at the swoop of the Eagle, they were now swallowed up in the agony
of eyesight. "Only last Sabbath was my sweet wee wean baptised in the
name o' the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" and on uttering
these words, she flew off through the brakes and over the huge stones,
up--up--up--faster than ever huntsman ran in to the death--fearless as a
goat playing among the precipices. No one doubted, no one could doubt,
that she would soon be dashed to pieces. But have not people who walk in
their sleep, obedient to the mysterious guidance of dreams, clomb the
walls of old ruins, and found footing, even in decrepitude, along the
edge of unguarded battlements, and down dilapidated stair-cases deep as
draw-wells or coal-pits, and returned with open, fixed, and unseeing
ey