23
going over to the Cat Linn, to gather a burden of sticks for firewood, she was surprised. on looking over the dike, to see a great body of crows collected, all of which were so intent on their prey, that they seemed scarcely to regard her presence as a sufficient cause for their desisting; she waved her burden-rope at them over the dike, but they refused to move. Her heart nearly failed her, for she remembred of having before seen something of the same scene, with some fearful concomitants. But pure and unfeigned religion, the first principle of which teaches a firm reliance on divine protection, can give courage to the weakest of humane beings. Tibby climbed over the dike, drove the vermin away, and there lay the corpse of her late unfortunate master, wofully defaced by these voracious birds of prey. He had bled himself to death in the Jugular vein, was lying without the hat, and clothed in a fine new black suit of clothes, top boots, which appeared likewise to be new, and gilt spurs, and the place where he lay was a little three-cornered sequestered spot, between the dike and the precipice, and inaccessible by any other way than through the field. It was a spot that Tibby had never seen before.
