Walter pretended to laugh at the whole narration; but when he did, it was with an altered countenance, for he observed, what none of them did, that Kennedy had indeed been borne through the air by some means or other; for his shoes were all covered with moss, which, if he had walked, could not have been there, for the grass would have washed it off from whatever quarter he had come.
Kennedy remained several days about Chapelhope in a thoughtful, half delirious frame; but no entreaties could prevail with him at that time to accompany the men of the place to where he supposed the accident had happened, nor yet to give them any account where it was situated, for he averred that he heard a voice say to him in a solemn tone, "If you wish to live long, never tell what you have seen to-night, nor ever come this way again." Happy had it been for him had he attended all along to this injunction. He slipped away from Chapelhope in a few days, and was no more seen until the time that Copland and his men appeared there. It was he who came as guide to that soldiers that were slain, and he fell with them in the strait linn of the South Grain of Chapelhope.
These mysterious and unaccountable incidents by degrees impressed the minds of the inhabitants with terror that cannot be described; no woman or boy would go out of doors after sunset, on any account whatever, and there was scarcely a man who durst venture forth alone after the fall of evening. If they could have been sure that brownies and fairies had only power to assume the human shape, they would not have been nearly in such peril and perplexity; but there was no form of any thing animate or inanimate, save that of a lamb, that they were sure of; they were of course waylaid at every turn, and kept in continual agitation. An owl was a most dangerous and suspicious-looking fellow--a white glede made them quake, and keep a sharp look-out upon his course in the air--a hare, with her large intelligent eyes and equivocal way of walking, was an object of general distrust--and a cat, squalling after dark, was the devil. Many were the ludicrous scenes that occurred, among which I cannot help mentioning those which follow, as being particularly whimsical.