Was it ever yet heard that brownie or bogle mixed colours for a painter?
Nay, touch me, and see whether I am not of sinful Scots flesh and blood"; and thereon I laughed aloud, knowing what caused his fear, and merry at the sight of it, for he had ever held tales of "diablerie," and of wraiths and freits and fetches, in high scorn.
He sat him down on a chair and gaped upon me, while I could not contain myself from laughing.
"For God's sake," said he, "bring me a cup of red wine, for my wits are wandering.

Deil's buckie," he said in the Scots, "will water not drown you?
Faith, then, it is to hemp that you were born, as shall shortly be seen." I drew him some wine from a cask that stood in the corner, on draught.

He drank it at one venture, and held out the cup for more, the colour coming back into his face.
"Did the archers tell me false, then, when they said that you had fired up at a chance word, and flung yourself and the sentinel into the moat?
And where have you been wasting your time, and why went you from the bridge ere I came back, if the archers took another prentice lad for Norman Leslie ?" "They told you truth," I said.
"Then, in the name of Antichrist--that I should say so!--how scaped you drowning, and how came you here ?" I told him the story, as briefly as might be.
"Ill luck go with yon second-sighted wench that has bewitched Elliot, and you too, for all that I can see.

Never did I think to be frayed with a bogle, {14} and, as might have been deemed, the bogle but a prentice loon, when all was done.

To my thinking all this fairy work is no more true than that you are a dead man's wraith.