by voluntarily drinking, his soul would be delivered into the clutches of the Evil One?  The thought brought him painfully to his feet with many a groan, and roused him to a careful examination of his gloomy prison.  Rough stone walls, oozing damp, an earthen floor, three stone steps leading up to a heavy iron-studded door in a corner of the room; and nothing else.  The one small window was far out of his reach.  A feeling of faintness crept over him; it might be a wile of Satan, or a spell cast over him by supernatural powers, but the time was past for hesitation, and he drank a great draught from the jack, sank feebly on the couch, and slept profoundly.

When the judge again awoke it was in a prison somewhat less gloomy, for a thin splash of pale sunlight now struck the wall, and gave light sufficient to show every corner of the room.  Again Lord Durie went through his fruitless search, and then, feeling hungry, and having suffered no visible ill effects from his first incautious draught of small-beer, he ate and drank heartily.  From the way in which the patch of sunlight crept up the wall, it was easy to tell that the time was evening.  Could it indeed be that no more than twenty-four hours back he had ridden, secure and free from this horrible care, along the shining sands by the crisp salt wavelets of the Forth?

What was that voice that he now heard, thin and hollow, on the evening air?  “Far yaud! far yaud!” and then, with eldritch scream, “Bauty,” it cried.  Such sounds, coming from he knew not where, fell disturbingly on the unaccustomed ears of a seventeenth-century Judge of Session, and Lord Durie’s sleep that night was broken by grim dreams.

Day followed day, week pressed on the heels of week, and still never a human face smiled on the unhappy judge.  Each morning he found on his little table a supply of food and drink, all good of their kind and plenty—­boiled beef or mutton, oaten cakes, pease bannocks, and always the jack of small-beer—­but never did he see human hand place them there, never did human form cheer him by its presence.

The solitary confinement and the utter want of occupation told on a nervous, somewhat highly strung temperament; and in the judge’s mind superstition began to hold unquestioned sway.  Things taught him in childhood by an old nurse, things which now folks, indeed, still believed, but which he himself had to some extent given up or dismissed from his thoughts, began to crowd back again into his brain.  No mere human power, surely, could have brought him here as he had been brought.  Was it in the dungeon of some sorcerer, of some disciple of the Devil, that he now lay?  Then, the shuffling old step that he heard so frequently, the thin voice calling, “Hey!  Maudge,” followed always by the mewing of a cat—­what could that be but some old hag, given over to evil deeds, talking to her familiar?  It was but the other day that, with his own eyes, he had seen nine witches burned together on Leith Sands,