remembered in traditions of the scattered cottages and the neighbouring suburb.
In latter times, as we have already noticed, the sequestered and broken
character of the ground rendered it a fit theatre for duels and rencontres among
the fiery youth of the period. Two or three of these incidents, all sanguinary,
and one of them fatal in its termination, had happened since Deans came to live
at St. Leonard's. His daughter's recollections, therefore, were of blood and
horror as she pursued the small scarce-tracked solitary path, every step of
which conveyed her to a greater distance from help, and deeper into the ominous
seclusion of these unhallowed precincts.
    As the moon began to peer forth on the scene with a doubtful, flitting, and
solemn light, Jeanie's apprehensions took another turn, too peculiar to her rank
and country to remain unnoticed. But to trace its origin will require another
chapter.
 

                               Chapter Fourteenth

 - The spirit I have seen
 May be the devil. And the devil has power
 To assume a pleasing shape.
                                                                         Hamlet.
 
Withcraft and demonology, as we have already had occasion to remark, were at
this period believed in by almost all ranks, but more especially among the
stricter classes of Presbyterians, whose government, when their party were at
the head of the state, had been much sullied by their eagerness to inquire into
and persecute these imaginary crimes. Now, in this point of view, also, Saint
Leonard's Crags and the adjacent Chase were a dreaded and ill-reputed district.
Not only had witches held their meetings there, but even of very late years the
enthusiast or impostor, mentioned in the Pandoemonium of Richard Bovet,
Gentleman,24 had, among the recesses of these romantic cliffs, found his way
into the hidden retreats where the fairies revel in the bowels of the earth.
    With all these legends Jeanie Deans was too well acquainted, to escape that
strong impression which they usually make on the imagination. Indeed, relations
of this ghostly kind had been familiar to her from her infancy, for they were
the only relief which her father's conversation afforded from controversial
argument, or the gloomy history of the strivings and testimonies, escapes,
captures, tortures, and executions of those martyrs of the Covenant, with whom
it was his chiefest boast to say he had been acquainted. In the recesses of
mountains, in caverns, and in morasses, to which these persecuted enthusiasts
were so ruthlessly pursued, they conceived they had often to contend with the
visible assaults of the Enemy of mankind, as in the cities, and in the
cultivated fields