employed in removing the rubbish from a corner which the stranger pointed out. If a half-pay Captain could have represented an ancient Border-knight, or an ex-Benedictine of the nineteenth century a wizard monk of the sixteenth, we might have aptly enough personified the search after Michael Scott's lamp and book of magic power. But the sexton would have been de trop in the group.[1]
Ere the stranger, assisted by the sexton in his task, had been long at work, they came to some hewn stones, which seemed to have made part of a small shrine, though now displaced and destroyed.
'Let us remove these with caution, my friend,' said the stranger, 'lest we injure that which I come to seek.'
'They are prime stanes,' said the sexton, 'picked free every ane of them; warse than the best wad never serve the monks, I'se warrant.'
A minute after he had made this observation, he exclaimed, 'I hae fund something now that stands again' the spade, as if it were neither earth nor stane.'
The stranger stooped eagerly to assist him.
'Na, na, haill o' my ain,' said the sexton; 'nae halves or quarters; 'and he lifted from amongst the ruins a small leaden box.
'You will be disappointed, my friend,' said the Benedictine, 'if you expect anything there but the mouldering dust of a human heart, closed in an inner case of porphyry.' I interposed as a neutral party, and, taking the box from the sexton, reminded him, that if there were treasure concealed in it, still it could not become the property of the finder. I then proposed, that as the place was too dark to examine the contents of the leaden casket, we should adjourn to David's, where we might have the advantage of light and fire while carrying on our investigation. The
- ↑ This is one of those passages which must now read awkwardly, since every one knows that the Novelist and the author of the Lay of the Minstrel, is the same person. But before the avowal was made, the author was forced into this and similar offences against good taste, to meet an argument, often repeated, that there was something very mysterious in the Author of Waverley's reserve concerning Sir Walter Scott, an author sufficiently voluminous at least. I had a great mind to remove the passages from this edition, but the more candid way is to explain how they came there.
