if they wad raise the very dead folk wi' the clatter, a kirk wi' a
chimley in't was fittest for them."





CHAPTER FOURTH.

On the Rialto, every night at twelve,
I take my evening's walk of meditation:
There we two will meet.
Venice Preserved.

Full of sinister augury, for which, however, I could assign no
satisfactory cause, I shut myself up in my apartment at the inn, and
having dismissed Andrew, after resisting his importunity to accompany him
to St. Enoch's Kirk,* where, he said, "a soul-searching divine was to haud
forth," I set myself seriously to consider what were best to be done.

* This I believe to be an anachronism, as Saint Enoch's Church was not
built at the date of the story. [It was founded in 1780, and has since
been rebuilt.]

I never was what is properly called superstitious; but I suppose that all
men, in situations of peculiar doubt and difficulty, when they have
exercised their reason to little purpose, are apt, in a sort of despair,
to abandon the reins to their imagination, and be guided altogether by
chance, or by those whimsical impressions which take possession of the
mind, and to which we give way as if to involuntary impulses. There was