Indeed, to judge from the difficulties he had already surmounted, he must have been of Herculean powers; for some of the stones he had succeeded in raising apparently required two men's strength to have moved them.

Hobbie's suspicions began to revive, on seeing the preternatural strength he exerted.
"I am amaist persuaded it's the ghaist of a stane-mason--see siccan band-statnes as he's laid i--An it be a man, after a', I wonder what he wad take by the rood to build a march dyke.

There's ane sair wanted between Cringlehope and the Shaws .-- Honest man" (raising his voice), "ye make good firm wark there ?" The being whom he addressed raised his eyes with a ghastly stare, and, getting up from his stooping posture, stood before them in all his native and hideous deformity.

His head was of uncommon size, covered with a fell of shaggy hair, partly grizzled with age; his eyebrows, shaggy and prominent, overhung a pair of small dark, piercing eyes, set far back in their sockets, that rolled with a portentous wildness, indicative of a partial insanity.

The rest of his features were of the coarse, rough-hewn stamp, with which a painter would equip a giant in romance; to which was added the wild, irregular, and peculiar expression, so often seen in the countenances of those whose persons are deformed.