vanishing when he beheld her sad and bewildered look. She raised her
eyes at the sound, and seeing a strange face, her arms slipped their
hold, and she dropped with a groan on the ground.

"The morning had now fairly broke; the flocks shook the rain from their
sides, the shepherds hastened to inspect their charges, and a thin blue
smoke began to stream from the cottages of the valley into the
brightening air. The laird carried Phemie Irving in his arms, till he
observed two shepherds ascending from one of the loops of Corriewater,
bearing the lifeless body of her brother. They had found him whirling
round and round in one of the numerous eddies, and his hands, clutched
and filled with wool, showed that he had lost his life in attempting to
save the flock of his sister. A plaid was laid over the body, which,
along with the unhappy maiden in a half-lifeless state, was carried into
a cottage, and laid in that apartment distinguished among the peasantry
by the name of the chamber. While the peasant's wife was left to take
care of Phemie, old man and matron and maid had collected around the
drowned youth, and each began to relate the circumstances of his death,
when the door suddenly opened, and his sister, advancing to the corpse,
with a look of delirious serenity, broke out into a wild laugh and said:
'Oh, it is wonderful, it's truly wonderful! That bare and death-cold
body, dragged from the darkest pool of Corrie, with its hands filled with
fine wool, wears the perfect similitude of my own Elphin! I'll tell
ye--the spiritual dwellers of the earth, the fairyfolk of our evening
tale, have stolen the living body, and fashioned this cold and inanimate
clod to mislead your pursuit. In common eyes this seems all that Elphin
Irving would be, had he sunk in Corriewater; but so it seems not to me.
Ye have sought the living soul, and ye have found only its garment. But
oh, if ye had beheld him, as I beheld him to-night, riding among the
elfin troop, the fairest of them all; had you clasped him in your arms,