Fiction > Book editions > Leipzig, 1888 - Kidnapped

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next valley. The country was pleasant round about,
running in low hills, pleasantly watered and wooded,
and the crops, to my eyes, wonderfully good; but the
house itself appeared to be a kind of ruin; no road led
up to it; no smoke arose from any of the chimneys;
nor was there any semblance of a garden. My heart
sank. "That!" I cried.
The woman's face lit up with a malignant anger.
"That is the house of Shaws!" she cried. "Blood built
it; blood stopped the building of it; blood shall bring
it down. See here!" she cried again — "I spit upon
the ground, and crack my thumb at it! Black be its
-fall! If ye see the laird, tell him what ye hear; tell
him this makes the twelve hunner and nineteen time
that Jennet Clouston has called down the curse on
him and his house, byre and stable, man, guest, and
master, wife, miss, or bairn — black, black be their fall ! "
And the woman, whose voice had risen to a kind of
eldritch sing-song, turned with a skip, and was gone.
I stood where she left me, with my hair on end. In
these days folk still believed in witches and trembled
at a curse; and this one, falling so pat, like a wayside
omen, to arrest me ere I carried out my purpose, took
the pith out of my legs.
I sat me down and stared at the house of Shaws.
The more I looked, the pleasanter that country-side
appeared; being all set with hawthorn bushes full of
flowers; the fields dotted with sheep; a fine flight of
rooks in the sky; and every sign of a kind soil and
climate; and yet the barrack in the midst of it went
sore against my fancy.
Country folk Avent by from the fields as I sat there