“Oh, my babe! my babe!” cried the agonized Bessy MacDermot, her eyes starting from their very sockets, in her anxiety to keep sight of the object of her affections, and her terrors.
But she did not follow it with her eyes alone. She paused not for a moment, but darted off through the standing corn, and over moor and moss, hill and heugh, and through woods, and rills, and bogs, in the direction which the eagle was taking, without once thinking of poor little Charley Stewart, who kept after her as hard as his active little legs could carry him; and, great as the distance was which they had to run, the eagle, impeded as he was in his flight by the precious burden he carried, was still within reach of the eyes of the panting and agonized mother, when a thinner part of the wood enabled her to see, from a rising ground, the cliff where he finally rested, and where he deposited the child in his nest, that was well known to hang on a ledge in the face of the rock, a little way down from its bare summit. On ran the frantic mother, with redoubled energy,—for she remembered that an old man lived by himself, in a little cot hard by the place, and she never rested till she sank down, faint and exhausted, at his door.
“Oh, Peter, Peter!—my baby, my baby!” was all she could utter, as the old man came hobbling out, to learn what was the matter.
“What has mischanced your baby, Mrs. MacDermot?” demanded Peter.
“Oh, the eagle! the eagle!” cried the distracted mother. “Oh, my child! my child!”
“Holy saints be about us! has the eagle carried off your child?” cried Peter, in horror.
“Och, yes, yes!” replied Bessy. “Oh my baby, my baby!”
“St. Michael be here!” exclaimed Peter. “What can an old man like me do to help thee?”
“Ropes! ropes!” cried little Charley Stewart, who at this moment came up, so breathless and exhausted that he could hardly speak.
“Ropes!” said Peter; “not a rope have I. There’s a bit old hair-line up on the baulks there, to be sure, that my son Donald used for stretching his hang-net; but it has been so much in the water, that I have some doubt if it would stand the weight of a man, even if we could get a man to go down over the nose of the craig;—and there is not a man but myself, that I know of, within miles of us.”