“That villain,” exclaimed the Dwarf,—­“that cool-blooded, hardened, unrelenting ruffian,—­that wretch, whose every thought is infected with crimes,—­has thewes and sinews, limbs, strength, and activity enough, to compel a nobler animal than himself to carry him to the place where he is to perpetrate his wickedness; while I, had I the weakness to wish to put his wretched victim on his guard, and to save the helpless family, would see my good intentions frustrated by the decrepitude which chains me to the spot.—­Why should I wish it were otherwise?  What have my screech-owl voice, my hideous form, and my mis-shapen features, 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 sympathy with any one.  Let Destiny drive forth her scythed car through the overwhelmed and trembling mass of humanity!  Shall I be the idiot to throw this decrepit form, this mis-shapen lump of mortality, under her wheels, that the Dwarf, the Wizard, the Hunchback, may save from destruction some fair form or some active frame, and all the world clap their hands at the exchange?  No, never!—­And yet this Elliot—­this Hobbie, so young and gallant, so frank, so—­I will think of it no longer.  I cannot aid him if I would, and I am resolved—­firmly resolved, that I would not aid him, if a wish were the pledge of his safety!”

Having thus ended his soliloquy, he retreated into his hut for shelter from the storm which was fast approaching, and now began to burst in large and heavy drops of rain.  The last rays of the sun now disappeared entirely, and two or three claps of distant thunder followed each other at brief intervals, echoing and re-echoing among the range of heathy fells like the sound of a distant engagement.

CHAPTER VII.

Proud bird of the mountain, thy plume shall be torn!—­ . . . .  Return to thy dwelling; all lonely, return; For the blackness of ashes shall mark where it stood, And a wild mother scream o’er her famishing brood.—­Campbell.

The night continued sullen and stormy; but morning rose as if refreshed by the rains.  Even the Mucklestane-Moor, with its broad bleak swells of barren grounds, interspersed with marshy pools of water, seemed to smile under the serene influence of the sky, just as good-humour can spread a certain inexpressible charm over the plainest human countenance.  The heath was in