over the undulating heights that form the end of the Ochil chain to the west; but, as yet, the sun, the only object seen in the whole horizon, appeared in full disk, red and lurid, like the mass of ember-faggots which, some hours before, lay in the street of St Andrews, surmounted by the blackened corpse of the martyr. The traveller turned his eye in the direction of the luminary; but quickly passed his hand over his brow, from an instinctive feeling of horror, as a dim wreath of cloud, stretching along the superior part of the fiery circle, seemed to realise again, in solemn magnificence, the sight he had witnessed. The altitude of the object which suggested the resemblance, with the gorgeousness in which it was arrayed, again claimed the aspiring thought, that the spirit of his friend, sublimed by the doctrines of the new faith, was even then journeying to the spheres which he contemplated. The final triumph of the martyr was completed in the scene of his agonies; and the seal of eternal truth was, by God's finger, imprinted on the doctrines he had published and explained in the midst of the melting fire of the furnace. Placing his hand in his breast, he drew forth the beautiful Latin treatise which his friend had composed on the subject of the justification of the sinner, through a believing faith in Him who was foretold from the beginning of time; and, sitting again down by the side of a hedge, he struggled, in the descending twilight, to store his mind with some of those precepts which were destined to claim the reverence of an enlightened world. He was soon lost in the rapt meditation in which the spirits of the early reformers rejoiced amidst the persecution with which they were surrounded, and was again in regions brighter than those of this world, in communion with him who, when the flames were already crackling among the faggots, cried out, "Behold the way to everlasting life!" From the exalted sphere of his dreamy cogitations he looked down with a contempt which, as his head reclined among the grass, might have been observed curling the lip of indignant scorn, upon all the thousand corruptions of the Old Church—its sold indulgences, its certified beatifications, its pardons, its soul-redeeming masses, its chanting music, its sins, and its ineffectual mortifications. The bright spirit of Christianity, arrayed in her pure garment of white, was before the view of his fancy; her clear seraphic eye beamed through his soul: and, with finger pointed to heaven, she invited him to brave the pile and the persecution of men, and gain the crown which was now encircling the temples of Hamilton. He thought he could then have died as his friend had perished, and that the pangs of the circling flames would have been felt by him merely as the smart pungency of a healing medicament, which the patient rejoices in as the means of acquiring health.

How long he remained under the influence of this beatific vision he knew not himself. He had fallen asleep. He opened his eyes: the sun had now gone down into the western main; and all that was left of his glory was a thin stream of wavy light, which, shooting across the dark firmament, looked like the wake of the passing spirit of his friend on its journey to heaven. He arose. The searching dews of evening had penetrated to his skin; a cold shiver shot through his frame; and again, clutched by the humbling and levelling harpies of worldly feelings, fears, and experiences, he felt all the terror of his former sensations when he beheld the corpse of the martyr sink with a crash among the embers, which, as they received the body, sent forth a cloud of hissing, crackling sparkles of fire, mixed with a dense cloud of smoke.

"Alas! this spirit of mine is strong only in dreams," he muttered to himself, as the shiver of the night air passed over him. "It is as the eagle of Bencleugh, which, with his eye in the sun and his feet under his tail-plumes, will resist the storms that shiver the pines of the Ochils; yet bring him to earth, and draw one feather from his wing, and he can only raise a streperous noise amidst the sweltering suffocation of his earth-crib."

He had scarcely uttered the words, when he saw the short, thick figure of a man coming along the road, enveloped in a gown, and bearing a stick like a thraw-crook in his hand. Starting to his feet, he stood, for a moment, to see if he could recognise the individual.

"Good even to ye, young Master o' Riddlestain," said the individual, as he came up, and was recognised by the youth—"good even to ye; and God send ye a warmer bed than the hedge-beild, and a caulder than ane o' bleezing faggots."

"Good even, Carey," replied the youth. "I return your salutation. The one lair, as a beadsman of Pittenweem, you may have experienced ere now; the other you stand in small fears of. From St Andrews, if I can judge from your allusion to the sad doings of to-day in that part?"

"Ye guess right," replied the beadsman, as they proceeded forward, side by side; "but how could you guess wrang, when every outlyer and rinner-about in the East Neuk has been this day at the head-quarters o' prelacy. A strange day and a selcouth sight for auld een. It's no often that Carey Haggerston carries a fu' ee and a fu' wallet."

"Then you were moved by the fate of poor Hamilton, Carey?" replied the youth.

"And wha, Papist or heretic, could stand yon sight wi' dry een?" replied the man, in a voice that trembled in the sinews of his throat. "I wad hae gien a' the bodles the prelates threw me—the mair by token, I think, that the puir callant was writhing in the fire-flaughts o' their anger—for ae stroke wi' this kevel at the head o' yon culroun caitiff o' an executioner. The bonny youth was roasted as if he'd been a capon for the table o' the cardinal, only there was mair smoke than might hae suited his lordship's palate, I reckon."

"You have got a good awmous, Carey, will sleep sound, and think nothing of it on the morrow?" said the youth.

"Anster Fair was naething to it," replied the beadsman. "The scene seemed to open the hearts o' prelates and priors, that never gave a plack to a bluegown before. I held up the corner o' my gown beneath the chapel o' the cardinal, and, sure enough, there were mair groats than tears fell into it. Ah, sir, though my wallet was yape, my heart was youden. But we're near the haugh road to Riddlestain, Master Henry, and, as the night is loun and light, I carena though I step up past the Quarryheugh wi' ye."

"You may expect small alms from the Droich," said Henry.

"No muckle, I daresay," replied the bluegown; "but I stand in nae fear o' him, and that's mair than the bauldest heart o' the East Neuk can say. I wad stroke the lang hair o' the creature any day for an awmous, unearthly as he is."

"Know you aught of this extraordinary being, Carey?" said the youth, as they turned up the haugh loan.

"Ye're no the first nor the hundredth that has put that question to the beadsman," replied the other, as he looked up with a side-glance in the face of the questioner. "Everybody thinks I should ken auld Mansie o' the Quarryheugh—the mair by token, I fancy, that naebody on earth kens mair o' him than just that he is a hurklin, gnarled carle, wha cam to the Quarryheugh some months syne, and biggit, wi' his ain hands, a beild which has mair banes than stanes in its bouk."

"I know more of him myself than that, Carey," said the young man.

"What ken ye?" rejoined the other, with a laugh.

Henry's silence was probably meant as a quickener of the beadsman's garrulity.

"Ye may ken, maybe," said the other, "that he speels the sides o' the Quarryheugh—that is, whar there are trees to haud by—like a squirrel, swinging frae ae ryss to anither, and sometimes dangling over the deep pool aneath him, like a showman's signboard, or a gammon frae the kitchen ciel o' the Priory o' Pittenweem; but the creature's legs are nae bigger than an urchin's, while his trunk and arms are like the knur and branches of an oak. What ken ye mair o' him? What kens ony ane