the lawful use thereof.'

During this discussion Ellangowan was somewhat like a woodcock
caught in his own springe. He turned his face alternately from the
one spokesman to the other, and began, from the gravity with which
Mannering plied his adversary, and the learning which he displayed
in the controversy, to give him credit for being half serious. As
for Meg, she fixed her bewildered eyes upon the astrologer,
overpowered by a jargon more mysterious than her own.

Mannering pressed his advantage, and ran over all the hard terms
of art which a tenacious memory supplied, and which, from
circumstances hereafter to be noticed, had been familiar to him in
early youth.

Signs and planets, in aspects sextile, quartile, trine, conjoined,
or opposite; houses of heaven, with their cusps, hours, and
minutes; almuten, almochoden, anabibazon, catabibazon; a thousand
terms of equal sound and significance, poured thick and threefold
upon the unshrinking Dominie, whose stubborn incredulity bore him
out against the pelting of this pitiless storm.

At length the joyful annunciation that the lady had presented her
husband with a fine boy, and was (of course) as well as could be
expected, broke off this intercourse. Mr. Bertram hastened to the
lady's apartment, Meg Merrilies descended to the kitchen to secure
her share of the groaning malt and the 'ken-no,' [Footnote: See
Note i.] and Mannering, after looking at his watch, and noting
with great exactness the hour and minute of the birth, requested,
with becoming gravity, that the Dominie would conduct him to some