Now, it happened that honest Angus M'Guire and Donald M'Nair, two brawny Highlanders, were that day busily occupied in distilling a drop of good whisky, in a subterraneous distillery, to which the hole wherein Gustavus had laid his wife, led by a covered and concealed passage; and it was in no other than this very place that Julia had been so plentifully supplied with the liquor by which she was so often inebriated. Sitting by the mouth of the worm or serpent, which gave forth drop by drop the poison, stronger and more hurtful than ever came from the mouth of the Snake of Lerna, they heard a strange noise on the ground over their heads, as Gustavus was busy about the details of his interment, and shook with unfeigned terror, as if they had been on the point of being discovered in their illicit operations. By and by they heard a rumbling in the mouth of the cavern, as if some one had been in the act of descending, and, rising and seizing each a pistol and a sword, they stood on the defensive, prepared to slay the first gauger that should set his face into their subterraneous dominions. But the never an exciseman appeared: in place of that, to them, most fearful of all mortal beings, they saw the identical coffin in which Julia M'Iver had been laid, fall with a heavy sound upon the floor of their dark habitation.
Terror-struck, twenty times more than if they had seen the ghost of a murdered exciseman, they stood with their hair forcing up their bonnets on their head, and stared till their eyes seemed ready to burst from the sockets, at the dreadful object of their fears. A faint light glimmered through the cave, and was reflected from the rows of white buttons with which the black vision was studded; and all the horrid features of the grim apparition were displayed by that kind of dim light by which they could be seen to advantage. They could speak not a word to each other; and their mutual looks excited by sympathy a greater mutual fear than ever; and so they still stood and looked, and wondered, and would have moved their bodies to take a closer survey, but could not for very nervousness--albeit any one of them would have knocked a gauger on the head in an instant. But it was clear, even to themselves, that they could not thus stand staring at a coffin for ever; and it is not unlikely that this prospective impossibility supplied the place of courage; and so, Donald being the less timid of the two, gradually approached and surveyed their extraordinary visiter. Beckoning his friend Angus forward, he proceeded to force open the lid.