“Ay, if you were to try a beef-steak off his rump or spare-rib, ye’ll find it more like the absynth I use in the kitchen than the flesh of a capon or three-year old stot.”

“Yea, I would be like unto him who was made to ’suck honey out of the living rock.’”

“The cruel man threw her away from him, just as if her tocher had been the weight of herself in copper, instead of gold.  And oh! it was so easily done; for the creature was not only, as I have said, light, but she had such a touchiness when her glancing eye saw that her love was not returned by him she loved beyond all the earth, that you would have thought she shrunk all up into a tiny child, couring in the corner of the big drawing-room, so like a wounded bird.”

“Yaw-aw-aw,” yawned the Seceder, half asleep. “’And he gave up the ghost in the room, while he sought his meat to relieve his soul.’”

“Asleep and dreaming,” cried Mrs. M’Pherson, who had got into the very spirit of description.  “Away to the Scouring Burn, and never show your face here again.”

But Aminadab soon pacified the wide-souled and wide-bodied cook, who, being of his own persuasion, really loved the man.  Yes, she was a Seceder from the old faith; and such a Seceder!  No wonder there was a blank among the congregation of mere bodies.

It was now well on to twelve, and Aminadab had that Cradle to pass, and the kirkyard to get through; all, too, with that idea in his head to which we have alluded, and which, we may as well tell, was no other than a vivid recollection of having seen this Brahma on a prior night.  He had discharged the notion at the time as an illusion, though in general he had little power over his supernatural fears, which were to him not indeed supernatural, but very natural; so much so, as we have said, that a mere inanimate and dead, very dead burying-place, had been more than once the means of cutting him out of a savoury piece of pork, and a good Logie-brewed tankard.  It was the allusion made by Janet that recalled the suspicion that he had seen “something.”  Ah, “something!” what a pregnant vocable—­so mysterious, so provocative of curiosity—­an “it!”—­of all the words in our language, the most suggestive of a difference from the real being of flesh and blood, carrying a name got at the baptismal font, whereby it shall be known and pass current like a counter.  And is it not at best only a counter, yea, a counterfeit?  We are only to each other as signs of things which are not seen; and yet we laugh when we hear the “it,” as if it might not be the very thing of which we are one of the signs!  Is it not thus that we are all humbugged in this world of ours?  For we take the sign for the thing; yea, talk to the sign, and love it, or hate it, or worship it—­all the while being as ignorant as mules, “ne pictum quidem vidit;” the very sign may be as far from the reality, as in philosophy we see it every day.  And thus, all wandering and groping in the dark, the blind leading the blind, we screech like owls at a spark of light from the real fountain beyond Aldebaran.