"Never you heed that," replied Sanders, pawkily; "how mickle got ye for the brodding o' her?"
"Sax pund Scots."
"Sax pund! my certie, think o' that! Witch pricking is profitable wark."
"Had ye seen Friar Gourlay," said Dobbie, with a leer, as he came up and joined them, "by my faith! he burned brawly when the cardinal had him harled to the Calton and worrit for his foul heresies. We put a tarred frock on him, sewit owre wi' bags o' grease and powder, and piled the weel oiled faggots knee-deep about him. We then fastened up his body to the stake by three iron cask-hoops that held him erect as a lance, and the fire bleezed round him like a war beacon. His yell and skirls were awsome to hear; but the smoke and the heat soon chokit him; and then, when the breeze blew the fire aside, we saw him standing upright and stark in the middle o't. Then his belly fell out, and the flames shot up between his birselled ribs and out at his scouthered jaws, his eyen and ear-holes! By my soul! gossip Birrel and gossip Screw, it was an awsome sicht, and one to be haud in memorie!" Even Dobbie, connoisseur as he was in these matters, shuddered at the recollection of this extra-judicial atrocity.
"But come," said Birrel, "there is St. Cuthburt's bell striking ten, and we have muckle to do wi' this dame ere morning peeps."
The trio then knocked at the iron gate of David's Tower, to which they were admitted.
Roland had heard but a part of their frightful conversation; it was beyond the power of human endurance to listen to all those wretches said. He rushed into the farthest corner of his apartment, covered his ears with his hands, and wept and groaned aloud in the utter impotency of his rage and grief. But how much wilder would that rage and grief have been, had he known that they were all gone to visit his hapless mistress, for the double purpose of performing some of those additional tortures to which those accused of sorcery were usually subjected, by order of the supreme tribunal in Scotland, and at the same time to accomplish another cruel plan of Sir Adam Otterburn's device.
CHAPTER XLV.
THE BOON.
"Now is't a deed of mercy brings thee here,—
Of mercy to a suffering fellow man,
Or is't his rank that summons all thy pity,
And lends thy tongue its load of eloquence?"—Old Play.