The man cried out, "Hey! hey!
What's the matter with ye, beast?" And then in an hysterical kind of
screech, "Great God! What's yon figure that I see? What's yon figure,
Tammas?"
The boy immediately raised himself into a kneeling position, and,
clutching hold of the man's arm, screamed, "I dinna ken, I dinna ken,
Matthew; but take heed, mon, it does na touch me. It's me it's come
after, na ye."
The moonlight was so strong that the faces of the speakers were
revealed to me with extraordinary vividness, and their horrified
expressions were even more startling than was the silent, ghastly
figure of the Unknown. The scene comes back to me, here, in my little
room in Norwood, with its every detail as clearly marked as on the
night it was first enacted. The long range of cone-shaped mountains,
darkly silhouetted against the silvery sky, and seemingly hushed in
gaping expectancy; the shining, scaly surface of some far-off tarn or
river, perceptible only at intervals, owing to the thick clusters of
gently nodding pines; the white-washed walls of cottages, glistening
amid the dark green denseness of the thickly leaved box trees, and the
light, feathery foliage of the golden laburnum; the undulating
meadows, besprinkled with gorse and grotesquely moulded crags of
granite; the white, the dazzling white roads, saturated with
moonbeams; all--all were overwhelmed with stillness--the stillness
that belongs, and belongs only, to the mountains, and trees, and
plains--the stillness of shadowland.
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