If you wish to spend your time rather in doing a good action than in talking about you know not what, I will give you an opportunity.

Do you see yonder crag to the right, over which appears the chimney of a lone house?
Go thither, inquire for one Jeanie Deans, the daughter of the goodman; let her know that he she wots of remained here from daybreak till this hour, expecting to see her, and that he can abide no longer.

Tell her, she _must_ meet me at the Hunter's Bog to-night, as the moon rises behind St.Anthony's Hill, or that she will make a desperate man of me." "Who or what are you," replied Butler, exceedingly and most unpleasantly surprised, "who charge me with such an errand ?" "I am the devil!"-- answered the young man hastily.
Butler stepped instinctively back, and commanded himself internally to Heaven; for, though a wise and strong-minded man, he was neither wiser nor more strong-minded than those of his age and education, with whom, to disbelieve witchcraft or spectres, was held an undeniable proof of atheism.
The stranger went on without observing his emotion.

"Yes! call me Apollyon, Abaddon, whatever name you shall choose, as a clergyman acquainted with the upper and lower circles of spiritual denomination, to call me by, you shall not find an appellation more odious to him that bears it, than is mine own." This sentence was spoken with the bitterness of self-upbraiding, and a contortion of visage absolutely demoniacal.

Butler, though a man brave by principle, if not by constitution, was overawed; for intensity of mental distress has in it a sort of sublimity which repels and overawes all men, but especially those of kind and sympathetic dispositions.