"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. But they are all wild about
it, at the castle, where I was kept long, doing no trade, and listening
to their mad clatter."

He took out of his pouch a parcel heedfully wrapped in soft folds of
silk.

"Here is this Book of Hours," he said, "that I have spent my eyesight,
and gold, purple, and carmine, and cobalt upon, these three years past; a
jewel it is, though I say so. And I had good hope to sell it to Hugh
Kennedy, for he has of late had luck in taking two English knights
prisoners at Orleans--the only profitable trade that men now can
drive,--and the good knight dearly loves a painted book of devotion;
especially if, like this of mine, it be adorned with the loves of
Jupiter, and the Swan, and Danae, and other heathen pliskies. We were
chaffering over the price, and getting near a bargain, when in comes
Patrick Ogilvie with a tale of this second-sighted Maid, and how she had
been called to see the King, and of what befell. First, it seems, she
boded the death of that luckless limb of a sentinel, and then you took it
upon you to fulfil her saying, and so you and he were drowned, and I left
prenticeless. Little comfort to me it was to hear Kennedy and Ogilvie
praise you for a good Scot and true, and say that it was great pity of
your death."

At this hearing my heart leaped for joy, first, at my own praise from