"I ran out; the villagers had noticed the accident also; we all hurried to the spot. The horse was struggling and snorting, and standing on his hind legs, between the trams, in a vain attempt to get free from the cart that was dragging him down the stream, but auld Hempy had disappeared.
"'What's that? There's the callant, there's the callant--see his bit head sooming down the stream like an otter'----
"I saw it, threw off my coat, and plunged in; but the upshot was, that although Tam Clink the blacksmith saved the _child_, the _dominie_ was near drowned; for I found to my cost that a stick-leg wasna canny to soom with, the buoyancy thereof producing a corresponding and very dangerous depression of the caput.
"We saved the boy; but the horse and cart, and Hempy himsell, were all drowned; it was the first time, I mind, that I had ever seen a dead corpse. The puir auld chiel was a stout buirdly man--he might have weighed sixteen stone; but when we gat him that forenoon, after the river had cast him ashore, stark and stiff, and carried him, and laid him out in the kirk aisle, it was fearful to observe how he had shrunk in bulk after the water had ran oot o' him; it wasna aften he took muckle o' that same in, so it was a sure sign he was dead; his stomach having fallen, had left the arch of his deep chest in fearful relief, and then the pinching of his blue features and the death-girn on his upper lip, that showed his twa buck teeth as if in anger--It was a maist awfu' sicht.
"'What! are you frichtened, Saunders?' said a voice close to me--'are you frichtened to look on a dead man, dominie? If you had been in Paris with me last summer, man, you would have seen a dozen lying every morning in the Morgue--ay, as nice and caller as if they had been haddies in a fishmonger's shop.'
"I looked up at the heartless creature. 'He was the father of a family, Mr Adderfang, and that drooked and shivering callant, that's greeting there at the head of the corp, is his son; and mair forby, he was a tenant o' yeer ain, sir, and'----
"He turned fiercely--'Keep your sentimentality for your next sermon, sir;' and he looked at me with a withering scowl that sent a chill to my heart. I felt a blighting of the soul that I would not willingly have acknowledged--a sort of crushing consciousness, that the person before me was in very deed my evil genius; but the _consciousness_ of such a feeling drove me in the present instance to return his savage look as haughtily as it was given; and I made a sudden motion with my hand, which made him start back, and grasp the sma' end of his long hammer-headed hunting whip.--'I say, dominie, I do not _quite_ understand you this morning; but, by G--, sir, if you give me an opportunity I will read you a lesson that is not in your primer.'--And he raised his whip threateningly. He was, as I have before mentioned, a tall well-put-together man, as we say in Lincumdodie, and far more than a match for me, at my best, when I had twa legs, and therefore incomparably my superior in bodily strength and activity, maimed as I now was. However, I took no time to consider of all this, but making a sudden spring, I wrenched his whip from him, and as he swerved from me, he fell over the trestle whereon the body of the carrier lay, and upset it, to the great horror of the bystanders; and there lay, side by side, the living scoffer and the dead corpse. A murmur of something that hovered between applause and disapprobation buzzed amongst the group of villagers; and the wee callant cried loud and bitterly, when, as the laird was in the act of gathering himself up, Mr Bland himsell entered the kirk, and with more sternness in his countenance than I had ever seen there before.