“One evening, during her brother’s absence with the flock, Phemie sat at her cottage-door, listening to the bleatings of the distant folds and the lessened murmur of the water of Corrie, now scarcely audible beyond its banks.  Her eyes, weary with watching along the accustomed line of road for the return of Elphin, were turned on the pool beside her, in which the stars were glimmering fitful and faint.  As she looked she imagined the water grew brighter and brighter; a wild illumination presently shone upon the pool, and leaped from bank to bank, and suddenly changing into a human form, ascended the margin, and, passing her, glided swiftly into the cottage.  The visionary form was so like her brother in shape and air, that, starting up, she flew into the house, with the hope of finding him in his customary seat.  She found him not, and, impressed with the terror which a wraith or apparition seldom fails to inspire, she uttered a shriek so loud and so piercing as to be heard at Johnstone Bank, on the other side of the vale of Corrie.”

An old woman now rose suddenly from her seat in the window-sill, the living dread of shepherds, for she travelled the country with a brilliant reputation for witchcraft, and thus she broke in upon the narrative:  “I vow, young man, ye tell us the truth upset and down-thrust.  I heard my douce grandmother say that on the night when Elphin Irving disappeared—­disappeared I shall call it, for the bairn can but be gone for a season, to return to us in his own appointed time—­she was seated at the fireside at Johnstone Bank; the laird had laid aside his bonnet to take the Book, when a shriek mair loud, believe me, than a mere woman’s shriek—­and they can shriek loud enough, else they’re sair wranged—­came over the water of Corrie, so sharp and shrilling, that the pewter plates dinneled on the wall; such a shriek, my douce grandmother said, as rang in her ear till the hour of her death, and she lived till she was aughty-and-aught, forty full ripe years after the event.  But there is another matter, which, doubtless, I cannot compel ye to believe:  it was the common rumour that Elphin Irving came not into the world like the other sinful creatures of the earth, but was one of the kane-bairns of the fairies, whilk they had to pay to the enemy of man’s salvation every seventh year.  The poor lady-fairy—­a mother’s aye a mother, be she elves’ flesh or Eve’s flesh—­hid her elf son beside the christened flesh in Marion Irving’s cradle, and the auld enemy lost his prey for a time.  Now, hasten on with your story, which is not a bodle the waur for me.  The maiden saw the shape of her brother, fell into a faint, or a trance, and the neighbours came flocking in—­gang on with your tale, young man, and dinna be affronted because an auld woman helped ye wi ’t.”