All the way up the thieves had seemed to him to be at his heels, but now the hallucination left him--he saw them again in the place of the ambuscade--and the thirst of vengeance seized on his dying mind.

Raising himself and pointing with an imperious finger into the black night from which he had come, he uttered the single command, "Brocken Dykes," and fainted.

He had never been loved, but he had been feared in honour.

At that sight, at that word, gasped out at them from a toothless and bleeding mouth, the old Elliott spirit awoke with a shout in the four sons.

"Wanting the hat," continues my author, Kirstie, whom I but haltingly follow, for she told this tale like one inspired, "wanting guns, for there wasna twa grains o' pouder in the house, wi' nae mair weepons than their sticks into their hands, the fower o' them took the road.