glimmering through the groaning trees Kirk Alloway seemed in a bleeze.
The grey walls of the little kirk are standing yet among the graves, though the last rafters of the ruined roof were carried off long since to be carved into mementos. The tombs of Lord Alloway’s family occupy one end of the interior, and a partition wall has been built dividing off that portion, but otherwise the place remains unchanged. The bell still hangs above the eastern gable, and under it remains the little window with a thick mullion, the “winnock bunker” in which the astonished farmer, sitting on his mare, and looking through another opening in the side wall, saw the queer musician ensconced.
A more eerie spot on a stormy night could hardly be imagined, the trees shrieking and groaning around, the Doon roaring in the darkness far below, while the thunder crashed overhead, and the lurid glare of lightning ever and again lit up the ruin. But with the unearthly accessories of warlocks and witches, corpse-lights and open coffins, with the screech of the pipes, and grotesque contortions of the dancers, the place must pass comparison in horror. Yet, inspired by “bold John Barleycorn,” the farmer stared eagerly in on the revels, till, fairly forgetting himself in the height of his admiration, he must shout out “Weel dune, Cutty Sark!” Then, in a moment, as every reader is aware, the lights went out, the pipes stopped, and the wrathful revellers streamed after him like angry bees. A few bounds of his mare down that narrow, winding, and rather dangerous road would carry Tam to the bridge, and the clatter of terrified Maggie’s hoofs as she plunged off desperately through the trees seems to echo in the hollow way yet. All the world knows how she carried her master in safety across the keystone of the bridge at the cost of her own grey tail. The feat was no easy one, for the single arch (still spanning the river there) was high and steep and narrow.
Beyond the Doon the old road rises inland, bowered high with ash and saugh trees, to the open country; and Tam, pale and sober no doubt, but breathing freer, had still twelve long miles before him to the far side of Kirkoswald in Carrick, where sat his wife--
