Not even the master's "Never mind them the nicht,
Jamie; they're safe eneuch, and I'll gie ye a hand in the morning,"
could calm his anxiety. However, on looking out before going to bed, he
was comforted to find the wind coming from the south, and apparently a
thaw beginning. He might sleep in peace after all; things were going to
turn out less bad than he had feared.
Tired as he was, however, try as he might, sleep would not come that
night; an unaccountable feeling of restlessness and of vague
apprehension had him in its grip. Hour after hour he lay, listening
irritably to the snoring of his fellow-shepherd, Borthwick, starting
nervously at every scraping of rat or creak of timber. At last, long
after midnight, he rose and looked out. The wind had fallen, but snow
still fell; there was nothing abnormal in the night, and the weather
might have been described as merely "seasonable." But away in the
northern sky, low down, appeared a strange break in the mist, such as
in all his experience he had never before seen. And it came to his mind
that the previous day, when on his homeward way he had "looked in" at
his uncle's house, the old man had predicted the coming of a violent
storm, which would surely spring from that quarter in which should first
be seen a phenomenon such as that on which Hogg was now looking.
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