" Dandy Jim
had had many a flirtation, but now he felt that his roving days were
nearly past. He was seriously thinking of matrimony.
"She's a bonny lass," thought he contemplatively, dwelling on the charms
of the young cook at the farmhouse he had left just past midnight,
"bonny and thrifty, and as fond o' a laugh as I am mysel. That bit shop
as ye come out o' Hexham, with red roses growing up the front o't, and
fine-scented laylock bushes at the back, that would do us fine...."
And so, safely wrapped up in happy plans and in thoughts of his
apple-cheeked lady-love, Jim manfully splashed through puddles and
tramped through mud, conscience free, and fearful of nothing in earth or
out of it. The graveyard at Eckford possessed no horrors for him.
"Bogles," quoth he, "what's a bogle? I threw muckle Sandy, the wrestler,
at Lammas Fair, an' pity the bogle that meddles wi' me."
But, nevertheless, Jim, glancing towards the old church with its
surrounding tombstones as he went by, saw something he did not expect,
and quickly checked the defiant whistle that is, somehow, an infallible
aid to the courage of even the bravest. There was a light over there
among the graves, a flickering light that the wind lightly tossed, and
that, somehow, did not suggest likeable things, even to Dandy Jim.
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