She mutter’d the spell of Swithin bold,
      When his naked foot traced the midnight wold,
      When he stopp’d the Hag as she rode the night,
      And bade her descend, and her promise plight.

       He that dare sit on Saint Swithin’s Chair,
       When the Night-Hag wings the troubled air,
       Questions three, when he speaks the spell,
       He may ask, and she must tell.

       The Baron has been with King Robert his liege
       These three long years in battle and siege;
       News are there none of his weal or his woe,
       And fain the Lady his fate would know.

       She shudders and stops as the charm she speaks;—­
       Is it the moody owl that shrieks? 
       Or is it that sound, betwixt laughter and scream,
       The voice of the Demon who haunts the stream?

       The moan of the wind sunk silent and low,
       And the roaring torrent had ceased to flow;
       The calm was more dreadful than raging storm,
       When the cold grey mist brought the ghastly Form!

’I am sorry to disappoint the company, especially Captain Waverley, who listens with such laudable gravity; it is but a fragment, although I think there are other verses, describing the return of the Baron from the wars, and how the lady was found “clay-cold upon the grounsill ledge.’”

‘It is one of those figments,’ observed Mr. Bradwardine, ’with which the early history of distinguished families was deformed in the times of superstition; as that of Rome, and other ancient nations, had their prodigies, sir, the which you may read in ancient histories, or in the little work compiled by Julius Obsequens, and inscribed by the learned Scheffer, the editor, to his patron, Benedictus Skytte, Baron of Dudershoff.’

’My father has a strange defiance of the marvellous, Captain Waverley,’ observed Rose, ’and once stood firm when a whole synod of Presbyterian divines were put to the rout by a sudden apparition of the foul fiend.’

Waverley looked as if desirous to hear more.

’Must I tell my story as well as sing my song?  Well—­Once upon a time there lived an old woman, called Janet Gellatley, who was suspected to be a witch, on the infallible grounds that she was very old, very ugly, very poor, and had two sons, one of whom was a poet and the other a fool, which visitation, all the neighbourhood agreed, had come upon her for the sin of witchcraft.  And she was imprisoned for a week in the steeple of the parish church, and sparely supplied with food, and not permitted to sleep until she herself became as much persuaded of her being a witch as her accusers; and in this lucid and happy state of mind was brought forth to make a clean breast, that is, to make open confession of her sorceries, before all the Whig gentry and ministers in the vicinity, who were no conjurors themselves.  My father went to see fair play between the witch and the clergy;