could have believed Robbie) for the space of half a mile with pitiful

entreaties. But the age is one of incredulity; these superstitious

decorations speedily fell off; and the facts of the story itself, like

the bones of a giant buried there and half dug up, survived, naked and

imperfect, in the memory of the scattered neighbours. To this day, of

winter nights, when the sleet is on the window and the cattle are quiet

in the byre, there will be told again, amid the silence of the young and

the additions and corrections of the old, the tale of the Justice-Clerk

and of his son, young Hermiston, that vanished from men's knowledge; of

the two Kirsties and the Four Black Brothers of the Cauldstaneslap; and

of Frank Innes, "the young fool advocate," that came into these moorland

parts to find his destiny.

CHAPTER I - LIFE AND DEATH OF MRS. WEIR

THE Lord Justice-Clerk was a stranger in that part of the country; but

his lady wife was known there from a child, as her race had been before

her. The old "riding Rutherfords of Hermiston," of whom she was the

last descendant, had been famous men of yore, ill neighbours, ill

subjects, and ill husbands to their wives though not their properties.

Tales of them were rife for twenty miles about; and their name was even

printed in the page of our Scots histories, not always to their credit.

One bit the dust at Flodden; one was hanged at his peel door by James

the Fifth; another fell dead in a carouse with Tom Dalyell; while a

fourth (and that was Jean's own father) died presiding at a Hell-Fire

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