Thus
seated, he banished, as much as he could, the superstitious feelings
which the late incident naturally inspired. His own were sad enough,
without the exaggeration of supernatural terror, since he found himself
transferred from the situation of a successful lover of Lucy Ashton, and
an honoured and respected friend of her father, into the melancholy
and solitary guardian of the abandoned and forsaken corpse of a common
pauper.
He was relieved, however, from his sad office sooner that he could
reasonably have expected, considering the distance betwixt the hut of
the deceased and the village, and the age and infirmities of three old
women who came from thence, in military phrase, to relieve guard upon
the body of the defunct. On any other occasion the speed of these
reverend sibyls would have been much more moderate, for the first was
eighty years of age and upwards, the second was paralytic, and the third
lame of a leg from some accident. But the burial duties rendered to the
deceased are, to the Scottish peasant of either sex, a labour of love.
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