Perhaps, in the end, the
task might even have been too much for the sheriff's party had it not
been that a treacherous tinker, named Allan, with a hammer struck the
old man a heavy blow on the face, fracturing the jaw and partially
stunning him. Then, bound hand and foot, Auld Ringan was carried to
Edinburgh. There, in the Tolbooth, he lay for eight long years,
suffering tortures, first from his broken jaw, and later from old wounds
that now broke out afresh. He that had lived so long a life in the pure
fresh air of the Border, who had loved more to hear the lark sing than
the mouse cheep, now languished in a foul, insanitary prison, and it was
but the ghost of his former self that at the end of his long confinement
crept away to pass the brief remainder of his days in a house in the
Crosscauseway, Edinburgh.
Auld Ringan Oliver died in 1736. He sleeps among the martyrs in
Greyfriars Churchyard.
A LEGEND OF NORHAM
In the days, now happily remote, when folks, provided as for a picnic,
laboriously travelled great distances in order to be present at the
execution of some unhappy wretch; in the days when harmless old women,
whose chief fault may probably have been that they were poor and
friendless, and perhaps by age and privation rendered little better than
half-witted, were baited, and dragged by an ignorant and credulous
populace to a fiery or to a watery death, there survived in Scotland yet
another barbarous custom not unworthy to take rank with witch-burning.
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