The clergyman pointed his cane to the carved oak panel of the latter.
"Within that chamber," observed he, "a whole lifetime since, did I sit by the deathbed of a goodly young man who, being now at the last gasp—" Apparently, there was some powerful excitement in the ideas which had now flashed across his mind. He snatched the torch from his companion's hand, and threw open the door with such sudden violence that the flame was extinguished, leaving them no other light than the moonbeams which fell through two windows into the spacious chamber. It was sufficient to discover all that could be known. In a high-backed oaken armchair, upright, with her hands clasped across her breast and her head thrown back, sat the Old Maid in the Winding-Sheet. The stately dame had fallen on her knees with her forehead on the holy knees of the Old Maid, one hand upon the floor and the other pressed convulsively against her heart. It clutched a lock of hair—once sable, now discolored with a greenish mold.
As the priest and layman advanced into the chamber the Old Maid's features assumed such a semblance of shifting expression that they trusted to hear the whole mystery explained by a single word. But it was only the shadow of a tattered curtain waving between the dead face and the moonlight.
"Both dead!" said the venerable man. "Then who shall divulge the secret? Methinks it glimmers to and fro in my mind like the light and shadow across the Old Maid's face. And now 'tis gone!"
WANDERING WILLIE'S TALE
BY SIR WAITER SCOTT
Sir Walter Scott, born in Edinburgh in 1771 and died at "Abbotsford" in 1832, published the first of his Waverley Novels ("Waverley") in 1814. "Redgauntlet," in which "Wandering Willie's Tale" occurs, appeared in 1824. Wandering Willie, who tells the tale, is Willie Steenson, a blind fiddler devoted to the Redgauntlet family. Many critics consider this the finest story in the English language. Andrew Lang, who calls it "immortal," describes ft as "that perfect model of a 'conte' in whose narrow range humor, poetry, the grotesque, the terrible are combined as in no other work of man."
WANDERING WILLIE'S TALE
By SIR WALTER SCOTT