The neighing and prancing of horses, and the bellowing of cows, augmented the horrors of the night; and to anyone who only heard the din, it seemed that the whole onstead was in a blaze, and horses and cattle perishing in the flame.  All wiles, common or extraordinary, were put in practice to entice or force the honest farmer and his wife to open the door; and when the like success attended every new stratagem, silence for a little while ensued, and a long, loud, and shrilling laugh wound up the dramatic efforts of the night.  In the morning, when Laird Macharg went to the door, he found standing against one of the pilasters a piece of black ship oak, rudely fashioned into something like human form, and which skilful people declared would have been clothed with seeming flesh and blood, and palmed upon him by elfin adroitness for his wife, had he admitted his visitants.  A synod of wise men and women sat upon the woman of timber, and she was finally ordered to be devoured by fire, and that in the open air.  A fire was soon made, and into it the elfin sculpture was tossed from the prongs of two pairs of pitchforks.  The blaze that arose was awful to behold; and hissings, and burstings, and loud cracklings, and strange noises, were heard in the midst of the flame; and when the whole sank into ashes, a drinking-cup of some precious metal was found; and this cup, fashioned no doubt by elfin skill, but rendered harmless by the purification with fire, the sons and daughters of Sandie Macharg and his wife drink out of to this very day.  Bless all bold men, say I, and obedient wives!”

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A RAFT THAT NO MAN MADE.

BY ROBERT T.S.  LOWELL.

I am a soldier:  but my tale, this time, is not of war.

The man of whom the Muse talked to the blind bard of old had grown wise in wayfaring.  He had seen such men and cities as the sun shines on, and the great wonders of land and sea; and he had visited the farther countries, whose indwellers, having been once at home in the green fields and under the sky and roofs of the cheery earth, were now gone forth and forward into a dim and shadowed land, from which they found no backward path to these old haunts, and their old loves:—­

[Greek:  Eeri kai nephelei kekalummenoi:  oude pot’ autous
Helios phaethon kataderketai aktinessin.]
Od.  XI.

At the Charter-House I learned the story of the King of Ithaca, and read it for something better than a task; and since, though I have never seen so many cities as the much-wandering man, nor grown so wise, yet have heard and seen and remembered, for myself, words and things from crowded streets and fairs and shows and wave-washed quays and murmurous market-places, in many lands; and for his [Greek:  Kimmerion andron demos],—­his people wrapt in cloud and vapor, whom “no glad sun finds with his beams,”—­have been borne along a perilous path through thick mists, among the crashing ice of the Upper Atlantic, as well as sweltered upon a Southern sea, and have learned something of men and something of God.