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When the judge again awoke it was in a prison somewhat less gloomy, for a thin splash of pale sunlight now struck the wall, and gave light sufficient to show every corner of the room. Again Lord Durie went through his fruitless search, and then, feeling hungry, and having suffered no visible ill effects from his first incautious draught of small-beer, he ate and drank heartily. From the way in which the patch of sunlight crept up the wall, it was easy to tell that the time was evening. Could it indeed be that no more than twenty-four hours back he had ridden, secure and free from this horrible care, along the shining sands by the crisp salt wavelets of the Forth?

What was that voice that he now heard, thin and hollow, on the evening air? “Far yaud! far yaud!” and then, with eldritch scream, “Bauty,” it cried. Such sounds, coming from he knew not where, fell disturbingly on the unaccustomed ears of a seventeenth-century Judge of Session, and Lord Durie’s sleep that night was broken by grim dreams.

Day followed day, week pressed on the heels of week, and still never a human face smiled on the unhappy judge. Each morning he found on his little table a supply of food and drink, all good of their kind and plenty–boiled beef or mutton, oaten cakes, pease bannocks, and always the jack of small-beer–but never did he see human hand place them there, never did human form cheer him by its presence.

The solitary confinement and the utter want of occupation told on a nervous, somewhat highly strung temperament; and in the judge’s mind superstition began to hold unquestioned sway. Things taught him in childhood by an old nurse, things which now folks, indeed, still believed, but which he himself had to some extent given up or dismissed from his thoughts, began to crowd back again into his brain. No mere human power, surely, could have brought him here as he had been brought. Was it in the dungeon of some sorcerer, of some disciple of the Devil, that he now lay? Then, the shuffling old step that he heard so frequently, the thin voice calling, “Hey! Maudge,” followed always by the mewing of a cat–what could that be but some old hag, given over to evil deeds, talking to her familiar? It was but the other day that, with his own eyes, he had seen nine witches burned together on Leith Sands, and all, ere they died, had confessed to the most horrid commerce with the Devil. It was no great time since a witch, under torture, had revealed in her confession the terrible truth, of how two hundred women had been wont to flock at night to a certain kirk in North Berwick, there to listen eagerly to Satan preaching blasphemy and denouncing the King. Even a judge was not safe from their malice. And could he but escape from the snare in which he now lay entangled, assuredly, Lord Durie thought, there should be more witch-burnings.

So the weeks dragged past, and Lord Durie lost all reckoning of the flight of time; but ever the belief strengthened that it was no mere human power that held him in bondage. And this belief received confirmation at last, for he awoke one night from confused and heavy sleep, to find himself once more bound, and wrapped, body and head, in the thick folds of a cloak. Then, seemingly without moving from his bed, he was borne through the air and set upon a horse; and again began that awful journey which once before he had endured. This time, too, in confirmation of his theory of the supernatural, when he came to his full senses it was to find himself lying behind a clump of whins by the sands of Leith, near to the very spot where, ages before, he had met a strange-looking man who tried to draw him into conversation on law. And nowhere was any cloak to be seen, nor trace of human agency. Only, he ached sorely, and his legs almost refused to bear the weight of his body, and in his head was the buzzing as of a thousand bees.