woman coming trudging down a hill; and she, when I had put my usual
question, turned sharp about, accompanied me back to the summit she had
just left, and pointed to a great bulk of building standing very bare
upon a green in the bottom of the next valley. The country was pleasant
round about, running in low hills, pleasantly watered and wooded, and
the crops, to my eyes, wonderfully good; but the house itself appeared
to be a kind of ruin; no road led up to it; no smoke arose from any of
the chimneys; nor was there any semblance of a garden. My heart sank.
"That!" I cried.

The woman's face lit up with a malignant anger. "That is the house of
Shaws!" she cried. "Blood built it; blood stopped the building of it;
blood shall bring it down. See here!" she cried again--"I spit upon
the ground, and crack my thumb at it! Black be its fall! If ye see the
laird, tell him what ye hear; tell him this makes the twelve hunner and
nineteen time that Jennet Clouston has called down the curse on him
and his house, byre and stable, man, guest, and master, wife, miss, or
bairn--black, black be their fall!"

And the woman, whose voice had risen to a kind of eldritch sing-song,
turned with a skip, and was gone. I stood where she left me, with my
hair on end. In those days folk still believed in witches and trembled
at a curse; and this one, falling so pat, like a wayside omen, to arrest
me ere I carried out my purpose, took the pith out of my legs.

I sat me down and stared at the house of Shaws. The more I looked,
the pleasanter that country-side appeared; being all set with hawthorn
bushes full of flowers; the fields dotted with sheep; a fine flight of
rooks in the sky; and every sign of a kind soil and climate; and yet the
barrack in the midst of it went sore against my fancy.