“Ye’ll no be pinched to find out Johnie Mortsheugh,” said the elder sibyl, and still her withered cheek bore a grisly smile; “he dwells near the Tod’s Hole, an house of entertainment where there has been mony a blythe birling, for death and drink-draining are near neighbours to ane anither.”

“Ay! and that’s e’en true, cummer,” said the lame hag, propping herself with a crutch which supported the shortness of her left leg, “for I mind when the father of this Master of Ravenswood that is now standing before us sticked young Blackhall with his whinger, for a wrang word said ower their wine, or brandy, or what not:  he gaed in as light as a lark, and he came out wi’ his feet foremost.  I was at the winding of the corpse; and when the bluid was washed off, he was a bonny bouk of man’s body.”  It may be easily believed that this ill-timed anecdote hastened the Master’s purpose of quitting a company so evil-omened and so odious.  Yet, while walking to the tree to which his horse was tied, and busying himself with adjusting the girths of the saddle, he could not avoid hearing, through the hedge of the little garden, a conversation respecting himself, betwixt the lame woman and the octogenarian sibyl.  The pair had hobbled into the garden to gather rosemary, southernwood, rue, and other plants proper to be strewed upon the body, and burned by way of fumigation in the chimney of the cottage.  The paralytic wretch, almost exhausted by the journey, was left guard upon the corpse, lest witches or fiends might play their sport with it.

The following law, croaking dialogue was necessarily overheard by the Master of Ravenswood: 

“That’s a fresh and full-grown hemlock, Annie Winnie; mony a cummer lang syne wad hae sought nae better horse to flee over hill and how, through mist and moonlight, and light down in the the King of France’s cellar.”

“Ay, cummer! but the very deil has turned as hard-hearted now as the Lord Keeper and the grit folk, that hae breasts like whinstane.  They prick us and they pine us, and they pit us on the pinnywinkles for witches; and, if I say my prayers backwards ten times ower, Satan will never gie me amends o’ them.”

“Did ye ever see the foul thief?” asked her neighbour.

“Na!” replied the other spokeswoman; “but I trow I hae dreamed of him mony a time, and I think the day will come they will burn me for’t.  But ne’er mind, cummer! we hae this dollar of the Master’s, and we’ll send doun for bread and for yill, and tobacco, and a drap brandy to burn, and a wee pickle saft sugar; and be there deil, or nae deil, lass, we’ll hae a merry night o’t.”

Here her leathern chops uttered a sort of cackling, ghastly laugh, resembling, to a certain degree, the cry of the screech-owl.

“He’s a frank man, and a free-handed man, the Master,” said Annie Winnie, “and a comely personage—­broad in the shouthers, and narrow around the lunyies.  He wad mak a bonny corpse; I wad like to hae the streiking and winding o’ him.”