CHAPTER XXXIV.

Why dost not comfort me, and help me out
From this unhallowed and blood-stained hole?

TITUS ANDRONICUS.

On the next morning, great was the alarm and confusion of the officers when they discovered the escape of their prisoner. Mac-Guffog appeared before Glossin with a head perturbed with brandy and fear, and incurred a most severe reprimand for neglect of duty. The resentment of the Justice appeared only to be suspended by his anxiety to recover possession of the prisoner, and the thief-takers, glad to escape from his awful and incensed presence, were sent off in every direction (except the right one) to recover their prisoner, if possible. Glossin particularly recommended a careful search at the Kaim of Derncleugh, which was оссаsionally occupied under night by vagrants of different descriptions. Having thus dispersed his myrmidons in various directions, he himself hastened by devious paths through the Wood of Warroch, to his appointed interview with Hatteraick, from whom he hoped to learn at more leisure than last night's conference admitted, the circumstances attending the return of the heir of Ellangowan to his native country.

With manoeuvres like those of a fox when he doubles to avoid the pack, Glossin strove to approach the place

of appointment in a manner which should leave no distinct track of his course. "Would to Heaven it would snow," he said, looking upward, "and hide these footprints. Should one of the officers light upon them, he would run the scent up like a blood-hound, and surprise us. I must get down upon the seabeach, and contrive to creep along beneath the rocks.”

And accordingly he descended from the cliffs with some difficulty, and scrambled along between the rocks and the advancing tide; now looking up to see if his motions were watched from the rocks above him, now casting a jealous glance to mark if any boat appeared upon the sea, from which his course might be discovered.

But even the feelings of selfish apprehension were for a time superseded, as Glossin passed the spot where Kennedy's body had been found. It was marked by the fragment of a rock which had been precipitated from the cliff above, either with the body or after it. The mass was now encrusted with small shell-fish, and tasselled with tangle and sea-weed; but still its shape and substance were different from those of the other rocks which lay scattered around. His voluntary walks, it will readily be believed, had never led to this spot; so that finding himself now there for the first time after the terrible catastrophe, the scene at once recurred to his mind with all its accompaniments of horror. He remembered how, like a guilty thing, gliding from the neighbouring place of concealment, he had mingled with eagerness, yet with caution, among the terrified group who surrounded the corpse, dreading lest any one should ask from whence he came. He remembered, too, with what conscious fear he had avoided gazing upon that ghastly spectacle. The wild scream of his patron, "My bairn! my bairn!"

again rang in his ears. "Good God!" he exclaimed, "and is all I have gained worth the agony of that moment, and the thousand anxious fears and horrors which have since embittered my life!-O how I wish that I lay where that wretched man lies, and that he stood here in life and health! But these regrets are all

too late."

Stifling, therefore, his feelings, he crept forward to the cave, which was so near the spot where the body was found, that the smugglers might have heard from their hiding-place the various conjectures of the bystanders concerning the fate of their victim. But nothing could be more completely concealed than the entrance to their asylum. The opening, not larger than that of a foxearth, lay in the face of the cliff directly behind a large black rock, or rather upright stone, which served at once to conceal it from strangers, and as a mark to point out its situation to those who used it as a place of retreat. The space between the stone and the cliff was exceedingly narrow, and being heaped with sand and other rubbish, the most minute search would not have discovered the mouth of the cavern, without removing those substances which the tide had drifted before it. For the purpose of further concealment, it was usual with the contraband traders who frequented this haunt, after they had entered, to stuff the mouth with withered sea-weed, loosely piled together as if carried there by the waves. Dirk Hatteraick had not forgotten this precaution.

Glossin, though a bold and hardy man, felt his heart throb, and his knees knock together, when he prepared to enter this den of secret iniquity, in order to hold conference with a felon, whom he justly accounted one of the most desperate and depraved of men. "But he has no

interest to injure me," was his consolatory reflection. He examined his pocket-pistols, however, before removing the weeds and entering the cavern, which he did upon hands and knees. The passage, which at first was low and narrow, just admitting entrance to a man in a creeping posture, expanded after a few yards into a high arched vault of considerable width. The bottom, ascending gradually, was covered with the purest sand. Ere Glossin had got upon his feet, the hoarse yet suppressed voice of Hatteraick growled through the recesses of the

cave.

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Hagel and donner!-be'st du!" "Are you in the dark?"

"Dark? der deyvil! ay," said Dirk Hatteraick; "where should I have a glim?"

"I have brought light;" and Glossin accordingly produced a tinder-box, and lighted a small lantern.

"You must kindle some fire too, for hold mich der deyvil, Ich bin ganz gefrorne!"

"It is a cold place, to be sure," said Glossin, gathering together some decayed staves of barrels and pieces of wood, which had perhaps lain in the cavern since Hatteraick was there last.

"Cold? Snow-wasser and hagel!-it's perdition—I could only keep myself alive by rambling up and down this d-d vault, and thinking about the merry rouses we have had in it."

The flame then began to blaze brightly, and Hatteraick hung his bronzed visage, and expanded his hard and sinewy hands over it, with an avidity resembling that of a famished wretch to whom food is exposed. The light shewed his savage and stern features, and the smoke, which in his agony of cold he seemed to endure almost

to suffocation, after circling round his head, rose to the dim and rugged roof of the cave, through which it escaped by some secret rents or clefts in the rock; the same doubtless that afforded air to the cavern when the tide was in, at which time the aperture to the sea was filled with water.

"And now I have brought you some breakfast," said Glossin, producing some cold meat and a flask of spirits. The latter Hatteraick eagerly seized upon, and applied to his mouth; and, after a hearty draught, he exclaimed, with great rapture, "Das schmeckt;—that is good—that warms the liver!" Then broke into the fragment of a High-Dutch song,

"Saufen Bier und Brante-wein,

Schmeissen alle die Fenstern ein;
Ich bin liederlich,

Du bist liederlich;

Sind wir nicht liederliche Leute a!"

"Well said, my hearty Captain!" cried Glossin, endeavouring to catch the tone of revelry,

"Gin by pailfuls, wine in rivers,

Dash the window-glass to shivers !

For three wild lads were we, brave boys,

And three wild lads were we;

Thou on the land, and I on the sand,
And Jack on the gallows-tree!

That's it, my bully-boy! Why, you're alive again now! And now let us talk about our business."

"Your business, if you please," said Hatteraick; "hagel and donner!-mine was done when I got out of the bilboes."

"Have patience, my good friend;-I'll convince you our interests are just the same."