Claud Halcro.
“Be mine the Imber-goose to play,
And haunt lone cave and silent bay:—
The archer’s aim so shall I shun—
So shall I ’scape the levell’d gun—
Content my verse’s tuneless jingle,
With Thule’s sounding tides to mingle,
While, to the ear of wandering wight,
Upon the distant headland’s height,
Soften’d by murmur of the sea,
The rude sounds seem like harmony!”
As the little bard stepped back, with an alert gait, and satisfied air, general applause followed the spirited manner in which he had acquiesced in the doom which levelled him with an Imber-goose. But his resigned and courageous submission did not even yet encourage any other person to consult the redoubted Norna.
“The coward fools!” said the Udaller. “Are you too afraid, Captain Cleveland, to speak to an old woman?—Ask her any thing—ask her whether the twelve-gun sloop at Kirkwall be your consort or no.”
Cleveland looked at Minna, and probably conceiving that she watched with anxiety his answer to her father’s question, he collected himself, after a moment’s hesitation.
“I never was afraid of man or woman.—Master Halcro, you have heard the question which our host desires me to ask—put it in my name, and in your own way—I pretend to as little skill in poetry as I do in witchcraft.”
Halcro did not wait to be invited twice, but, grasping Captain Cleveland’s hand in his, according to the form which the game prescribed, he put the query which the Udaller had dictated to the stranger, in the following words:—
Claud Halcro.
“Mother doubtful, Mother dread,
Dweller of the Fitful-head,
A gallant bark from far abroad,
Saint Magnus hath her in his road,
With guns and firelocks not a few—
A silken and a scarlet crew,
Deep stored with precious merchandise,
Of gold, and goods of rare device—
What interest hath our comrade bold
In bark and crew, in goods and gold?”
There was a pause of unusual duration ere the oracle would return any answer; and when she replied, it was in a lower, though an equally decided tone, with that which she had hitherto employed:—