While the parents were thus speaking of their daughter a loud sugh of wind came suddenly over the cottage, and the leafless ash-tree under whose shelter it stood, creaked and groaned dismally, as it passed by.--The father started up, and going again to the door, saw that a sudden change had come over the face of the night. The moon had nearly disappeared, and was just visible in a dim yellow, glimmering in the sky.--All the remote stars were obscured, and only one or two faintly seemed in a sky that half an hour before was perfectly cloudless, but that was now driven with rack, and mist, and sleet, the whole atmosphere being in commotion. He stood for a single moment to observe the direction of this unforseen storm, and then hastily asked for his staff. "I thought I had been more weather-wise--A storm is coming down from the Cairnbrae-hawse, and we shall have nothing but a wild night." He then whistled on his dog--an old sheep dog, too old for its former labours and set off to meet his daughter, who might then, for aught he knew, be crossing the Black-moss.
The mother accompanied her husband to the door, and took a long frightened look at the angry sky. As she kept gazing, it became still more terrible. The last shred of blue was extinguished--the wind went whirling in roaring eddies, and great flakes of snow circled about in the middle air, whether drifted up from the ground, or driven down from the clouds, the fear-striken mother knew not, but she at least knew, that it seemed a night of danger, despair, and death. "Lord have mercy on us James, what will become of our poor bairn!" But her husband heard not her words, for he was already out of sight in the snow storm, and she was left to the terror of her own soul in that lonesome cottage.
Little Hannah Lee had left her master's house, soon as the rim of the great moon was seen by her eyes, that had been long anxiously watching it from the window, rising like a joyful dream, over the gloomy mountain-tops; and all by herself she tripped along beneath the beauty of the silent heaven. Still as she kept ascending and descending the knolls that lay in the bosom of the glen, she sung to herself a song, a hymn, or a psalm, without the accompaniment of the streams, now all silent in the frost; and ever and anon she stopped to try to count the stars that lay in some more beautiful part of the sky, or gazed, on the constellations that she knew, and called them, in her joy, by the names they bore among the shepherds.--There were none to hear her voice, or see her smiles, but the ear and eye of Providence. As on she glided and took her looks from heaven, she saw her own little fire-side--her parents waiting for her arrival--the bible opened for worship--her own little room kept so neatly for her, with its mirror hanging by the window, in which to braid her hair by the morning light--her bed prepared for her by her mother's hand--the primroses in her garden peeping through the snow--old Tray, who ever welcomed her home with his dim white eyes--the poney and the cow; friends all, and inmates of that happy household. So stepped she along, while the snow diamonds glittering around her feet, and the frost wove a wreath of lucid pearls around her forehead.
