Chapter 4

--See thou shake the bags
Of hoarding abbots; angels imprisoned
Set thou at liberty--
Bell, book, and candle, shall not drive me back,
If gold and silver beckon to come on.
King John.

The night set in stormy, with wind and occasional showers of rain. "Eh,
sirs," said the old mendicant, as he took his place on the sheltered side
of the large oak-tree to wait for his associate--"Eh, sirs, but human
nature's a wilful and wilyard thing!--Is it not an unco lucre o' gain wad
bring this Dousterdivel out in a blast o' wind like this, at twal o'clock
at night, to thir wild gousty wa's?--and amna I a bigger fule than
himsell to bide here waiting for him?"

Having made these sage reflections, he wrapped himself close in his
cloak, and fixed his eye on the moon as she waded amid the stormy and
dusky clouds, which the wind from time to time drove across her surface.
The melancholy and uncertain gleams that she shot from between the
passing shadows fell full upon the rifted arches and shafted windows of
the old building, which were thus for an instant made distinctly visible
in their ruinous state, and anon became again a dark, undistinguished,
and shadowy mass. The little lake had its share of these transient beams
of light, and showed its waters broken, whitened, and agitated under the
passing storm, which, when the clouds swept over the moon, were only
distinguished by their sullen and murmuring plash against the beach. The
wooded glen repeated, to every successive gust that hurried through its
narrow trough, the deep and various groan with which the trees replied to
the whirlwind, and the sound sunk again, as the blast passed away, into a
faint and passing murmur, resembling the sighs of an exhausted criminal
after the first pangs of his torture are over. In these sounds,
superstition might have found ample gratification for that State of
excited terror which she fears and yet loves. But such feeling is made no
part of Ochiltree's composition. His mind wandered back to the scenes of
his youth.

"I have kept guard on the outposts baith in Germany and America," he said
to himself, "in mony a waur night than this, and when I ken'd there was
maybe a dozen o' their riflemen in the thicket before me. But I was aye
gleg at my duty--naebody ever catched Edie sleeping."

As he muttered thus to himself, he instinctively shouldered his trusty
pike-staff, assumed the port of a sentinel on duty, and, as a step
advanced towards the tree, called, with a tone assorting better with his
military reminiscences than his present state--"Stand! who goes there?"

"De devil, goot Edie," answered Dousterswivel, "why does you speak so