156 



CHAP. VI. 



" Stay, huntsman, stay ; a lurid gloom 

 Hangs threatening o'er your head ; 

 The rain comes lashing o'er the moor, 

 The thunderbolt is sped. 



" And mirk and mirker grows the hill, 



And fiercer sweeps the blast ; 

 The heavens declare His wondrous power 

 Who made the mountains fast. " 



THE night had been dark and stormy, and the morning 

 broke over the mountains in flames of red and amber ; 

 thin wreaths of mist were ascending from the Yale of 

 Tay, and went twisting s,nd flickering up the hill sides ; 

 there were no dark frowning clouds in the sky, but a sort 

 of aqueous appearance about the light itself, that occasioned 

 certain gloomy forebodings in the breast of our sportsman. 

 True it is that he passed rapidly over the moor, as he was 

 wont, and ate his usual slender meal with tolerable re- 

 signation. But to say that he enjoyed any thing like 

 elevation of spirits would be an absolute perversion of the 

 case, for the red flushing of the morning was ominous, and, 

 if I must speak the truth, it put him into that state of 

 mind which the world have combined to call most abom- 

 inably disagreeable, As he strode up Ben Derig nothing 

 went right. " Davy, you are always striking the dogs 

 with the spare ramrod. How the deuce can you be so 



