Second Journey to Thrums 377

was like to be my coffin, is almost a blank. After
what may have been but a short journey, though
I had time in it to say my prayers twice, we
stopped, jammed among fallen trees; and seeing
a bank within reach, I tried to creep up it. In
this there would have been little difficulty had
not the contents of the kist caught in my feet
and held on to them, like living things afraid of
being left behind. I let down my hands to dis-
entangle my feet, but failed; and then, grown
desperate, I succeeded in reaching firm ground,
dragging I knew not what after me. It proved
to be a pillow-slip. Green Brae still shudders
when I tell him that my first impulse was to
leave the pillow slip unopened. However, I
ripped it up, for to undo the wet strings that
had ravelled round my feet would have wearied
even a man with a needle to pick open the
knots; and among broken gimlets, the head of
a grape, and other things no beggar would have
stolen, I found a tin canister containing fifty
pounds. Waster Lunny says that this should
have made a religious man of Green Brae, and
it did to this extent, that he called the fall of the
cotter’s house providential. Otherwise, the cotter,
at whose expense it may be said the money was
found, remains the more religious man of the
two.

At last I came to the Kelpie’s brig, and I
could have wept in joy (and might have been
better employed), when, like everything I saw on
that journey, it broke suddenly through the mist,
and seemed to run at me like a living monster.
Next moment I ran back, for as I stepped upon