A grim and grisly goblin, of unwholesome oatcake hue, fluttered (no other word describes the wild and fitful unreliability of his movements) before my startled gaze; his eyes, like glassy beads, shone horridly.
My dog raised his head, and looked over his shoulder. When his gaze fell on the Apparition he bounded to his feet, his limbs shaking like jelly, his eyes projecting like shining stars, and his hair standing up round his neck like a frill.
He tried to growl, but the sound, shaken and softened by terror, issued to the night in lamb-like bleats. Yet more appalled by his vocal failure, he shrank, still feebly bleating, backwards under the sofa.
For my part, I believe I may say I was not afraid, but intensely excited. I felt that something was about to be revealed to me; this was the reason why my hand trembled so as to knock Shakespeare, Bacon, and Donnelly in one commingled heap of fallen glory to the floor.
I was curious, fascinated, and highly wrought.
The wild and fitful little shape bewilderingly wriggled and flickered in the light, and his ghast and fixed eye was painful to endure. Yet I felt that we two had not met without reason. Instinct told me we should do business.
He was the jerkiest and perkiest little figure I had ever clapped eyes on. He bore his head with confident, nay impudent, erectness; his arms waved like a windmill's; and his shapeless little legs straddled all over the place in a succession of purposeless leaps and flings and prancings.
So quick and fidgety were his movements that it was not easy to catch the details of his dress; but I saw that his tartan was a spider's web, to whose check the slimy snail had imparted a variety of hue unknown to Macgregor or Macpherson; his bonnet was a flowering thistle; his philabeg was made of the beards of oat-florets; his buckle was a salmon's scale; and a blade of finest rye dangled proudly by his side.
"Ye'll know me the noo if ye'll speir lang enoo," he squealed ironically when I had stared for some moments. "Gape and glower till your lugs crack, but ye canna' alter the fact that a' great men are Scots. Burrrns was Scottish, and Allan Ramsay, and Blair, and Thomson, Smollett, and Hume, and Boswell, and Adam Smith, and Stewart, and Hogg, and Campbell; and ay, Sir Walter Scott, Tam Carlyle, and Lord Brougham; and Chalmers, and Brewster, and Lyell, and Livingstone, and Macbeth, and McGinnis; Macchiaveli, the Maccabees; and Macaronis, the Macintoshes and Macrobes; and what reason hae ye to suppose that the author of Shakespeare's Plays was an exception?"