The Black Dwarf

squires of the nig

’s booty; let us b

he shade, mini

e Fourth

ntains which surrounded this desolate spot. The Dwarf sate watching the clouds as they lowered above each other in masses of conglomerated vapours, and, as a strong lurid beam of the sinking luminary darted full on his solitary and uncouth figure, he might well have seemed the demon of the storm which was gathering, or some gnome summoned forth

a sinister expression of violence, impudence, and cunning, each of which seemed alternately to predominate over the others. Sandy-coloured hair, and reddish eyebrows, from under which looked forth his sharp grey eyes, completed the inauspicious outline of the horseman’s physiognomy. He had pistols in his holsters, and anothe

” rapine and murder o

ay, ay, Elshie, your leech-craft h

nt which you made during your illn

eturned the unabashed convalescent. “Ye ken, Elshie

as sick, the devi

as well, the dev

wolf from his appetite for carnage, or a raven from her s

the lads of Westburnflat, for ten lang descents, have been reivers and lifters. They have all drun

said the Dwarf, “as ever leapt a lamb-fold at n

skill no

at thy purpose is bad, thy deed will b

t, Father Elshie, eh?” said Westb

Solitary, “that are scourges to their fel

at sets a man’s bristles up, ye ken. And this is nae great matter, after a’; ju

f?” said the Solitar

-town that he’s fit for, and no keep skelping about here, destroying the few deer that are left in the country, and pretending to act as

Heugh-foot,” said Elshie. “Wh

Hobbie’s feud, and a’ his clan’s. But it’s not so much for that, as to gie him a lesson not to let his tongue gallop ower freely about his betters. I trow he will hae lost the best pen-feather o’ his wing

is spurs without moderation or mercy. The horse became furious, reared, kicked, plunged, and bolted like a deer, with all his four feet off the ground at once. It was in vain; the unrelenting rider sate as i

es, to do with the fairer workmanship of nature? Do not men receive even my benefits with shrinking horror and ill-suppressed disgust? And why should I interest myself in a race which accounts me a prodigy and an outcast, and which has treated me as such? No; by all the ingratitude which I have reaped — by all the wrongs which I have sustained — by my imprisonment, my stripes, my chains, I will wrestle down my feelings of rebellious humanity! I will not be the fool I have been, to swerve from my principles whenever there was an appeal, forsooth, to my feelings; as if I, towards whom none show sympathy, ought to have s

urst in large and heavy drops of rain. The last rays of the sun now disappeared entirely, and two or three claps of distant thunder