74 STORY OF HANNAH LAMOND 



savage bird dashing close to her head, so that she saw 

 the yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at once they 

 quailed, and were cowed. Yelling, they flew off to 

 the stump of an ash jutting out of a cliff, a thousand 

 feet above the cataract, and the Christian mother fall- 

 ing across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and blood, 

 clasped her child dead dead dead, no doubt, but 

 unmangled and untorn, and swaddled up just as it was 

 when she laid it down asleep among the fresh hay, in a 

 nook of the harvest field. Oh ! what pang of perfect 

 blessedness transfixed her heart from that faint feeble 

 cry 'It lives it lives it lives!' and baring her 

 bosom, with loud laughter and eyes dry as stones, she 

 felt the lips of the unconscious innocent once more 

 murmuring at the fount of life and love ! 



" Where, all this while, was Mark Steuart, the 

 sailor ? Half way up the cliffs. But his eye had got 

 dim, and his head dizzy, and his heart sick ; and he 

 who had so often reefed the top-gallant-sail, when at 

 midnight the coming of the gale was heard afar, co- 

 vered his face with his hands, and dared look no longer 

 on the swimming heights. ' And who will take care 

 of my poor bed-ridden mother,' thought Hannah, whose 

 soul, through the exhaustion of so many passions, could 

 no more retain in its grasp that hope which it had 

 clutched in despair. A voice whispered ' GOD.' She 

 looked round expecting to see an angel, but nothing 

 moved except a rotten branch, that under its own 

 weight, broke off from the crumbling rock. Her eye, 

 by some secret sympathy of her soul with the in- 

 animate object, watched its fall ; and it seemed to stop, 

 not far off on a small platform. Her child was bound 



