CHAPTER FOURTH.
-- See thou shake the bags Of hoarding abbots; angels imprisoned Set thou at liberty-- Bell, book, and candle, shall not drive me back, If gold and silver beckon to come on.
King John.
The night set in stormy, with wind and occasional showers of rain.

"Eh, sirs," said the old mendicant, as he took his place on the sheltered side of the large oak-tree to wait for his associate--"Eh, sirs, but human nature's a wilful and wilyard thing!--Is it not an unco lucre o' gain wad bring this Dousterdivel out in a blast o' wind like this, at twal o'clock at night, to thir wild gousty wa's ?--and amna I a bigger fule than himsell to bide here waiting for him ?" Having made these sage reflections, he wrapped himself close in his cloak, and fixed his eye on the moon as she waded amid the stormy and dusky clouds, which the wind from time to time drove across her surface.
The melancholy and uncertain gleams that she shot from between the passing shadows fell full upon the rifted arches and shafted windows of the old building, which were thus for an instant made distinctly visible in their ruinous state, and anon became again a dark, undistinguished, and shadowy mass.

The little lake had its share of these transient beams of light, and showed its waters broken, whitened, and agitated under the passing storm, which, when the clouds swept over the moon, were only distinguished by their sullen and murmuring plash against the beach.

The wooded glen repeated, to every successive gust that hurried through its narrow trough, the deep and various groan with which the trees replied to the whirlwind, and the sound sunk again, as the blast passed away, into a faint and passing murmur, resembling the sighs of an exhausted criminal after the first pangs of his torture are over.

In these sounds, superstition might have found ample gratification for that State of excited terror which she fears and yet loves.